Trying to Downgrade to Previous Version

[Michael Cromer]

Hello,

I also submitted this question to Atlassian support, but I'm interested in the community's input as well.

In mid-December 2022, we upgraded our on-premises Jira Server instance from v8.9.0 to v9.4 via Docker container. Our Jira Software license was renewed and allowed for Jira to be upgraded, but we have not renewed licensing for a couple of plug-ins. Those plug-ins are reporting that a) the updated plug-in versions won't work because the license is invalid, and b) the old plug-in versions are not supported by the new Jira version.

We would like to attempt to downgrade our Jira application down to v8.22.6 via Docker container, which should be the latest available version of Jira that still supports these plug-ins. I saw that the way to attempt this is to edit /opt/atlassian/jira/bin/setenv.sh to the following:
: ${JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS:="-DJira.downgrade.allowed=true"}.

However, when restarting the Docker container, the GUI displays the "Failed to start Jira due to a build number inconsistency" warning. If someone can let me know what I'm doing wrong, I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You can't downgrade a Jira that far (in some cases, you can't do it at all).  You may find you can downgrade to Jira 9.0, but you won't be able to go further.

The database has been upgraded to the 9.4 schema, and there's no code to revert it to previous version.  If you're ok to go down to 9.0, then you can change the build number in the database in order to allow Jira to run, but you'll need to do a lot of testing to see if it's all working ok.

The only way to downgrade to 8 is to restore a backup of the database you had when you were last on 8.something.

Your best option is to licence the plugins if you still need them, and get the latest versions of them that do run on 9.4