Upgrading from 3.13.5 to 6

[DJX]

I am attempting to upgrade from 3.13.5 to version 6.

My plan is to abandon all modifications to my JIRA instance, bring forward the issues, and then bring the customizations back one by one. Is there a recommended way to do this other than stepping through the versions?

The articles I've read suggest doing the following path:

3.13.5 > 4.0 > 4.4.5 > 5.0 > 6.0

However, when I try to upgrade to 4.0, the installer does not give an option to upgrade, and the 4.4.5 installer says that it cannot upgrade the existing version.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The older installers didn't really have an "upgrade" front end, in some ways, they are more simple. You install Jira 4.0, manually point it at an old Jira 3 database, and it goes "ooh, I need to upgrade that" and does it. No prompting or questions, it just gets on with it.

Your approach is right, IMHO, for upgrading Jira itself, but you could run into serious problems with plugins. Depends on what they are, but some may have changed classes, and some may need to be in place to upgrade any data they've got.

I could ramble at length and try to explain that, and give examples, but I suggest a more simple approach - list what you've got (and definitely want to retain) and people here may be able to give you pointers on them.

[DJX]

Thank you very much for your response! I felt like there was some missing piece that was just "assumed" from all the documentation I was reading. I will go through and do the fresh install and point it at the old server.

As far as the plugins, I'm following pretty much what you've suggested. I have documented everything I currently use, but I also know there are things I have plugins for that JIRA 6 now has built in. I first want to confirm I can get all the issues ported over, and then I will start focusing more on getting the individual plugins working.

I have a test environment to work with, so I want to make sure I know how to do it before I do it in the production environment.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

My concern there is that you may have plugins that have a need for data upgrade. If you do, then if you drop them on 3.x to 4.x, you could find that when you re-install them in 6.x, they won't be able to cope with your data.

However, I assume you are doing a test run - in that case, I'd allow time to do it a few times, and, as you say, start with a simple upgrade of just Jira, end to end. Then you can evaluate all the plugins in 6 and decide which ones to take through a full upgrade if necessary.

[DJX]

Can you clarify what you mean by "data upgrade"?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can answer by example.

A plugin I scribbled for Jira 3.0.3 provided a custom field to the user, and stored some data for it. Jira 3.5 improved the area we did it for, so we simplified the plugin to take advantage of it. The data needed to be changed, quite a lot, so we wrote an "upgrade data" task to handle it on upgrade. Worked fine. But if we'd have gone from 3.0.3 to 3.6, it would not have run the data upgrade correctly, and we'd have plugged in a field that simply did not work. We HAD to go through 3.5 before we could jump to 3.6 if we wanted our field data to survive!

[DJX]

Thank you very much for your response! I felt like there was some missing piece that was just "assumed" from all the documentation I was reading. I will go through and do the fresh install and point it at the old server.

As far as the plugins, I'm following pretty much what you've suggested. I have documented everything I currently use, but I also know there are things I have plugins for that JIRA 6 now has built in. I first want to confirm I can get all the issues ported over, and then I will start focusing more on getting the individual plugins working.

I have a test environment to work with, so I want to make sure I know how to do it before I do it in the production environment.