Prerequisites

On this page:

1 Prerequisites
2 Instance prep
3 Best practice

Use this as a quick reminder of the prerequisites, key tasks, and best practices that help ensure that your data migrations run smoothly. We recommend that you refer to our Project Configurator checklists whenever you prepare for a migration process. Whether you are merging multiple instances or simply promoting a few changes from a development environment to production, you’ll find these very helpful.

Prerequisites

	Have Jira System Administrator permissions.
	Project Configurator must be installed on both the source and target instances.
	Have a paid Project Configurator license for the target instance. You can use a trial or evaluation license to complete your export/import processes for a Jira test instance, but you must have a paid license to complete an import on a Jira production instance.
	Jira locale and language need to be the same on both source and target instances. Additionally, both Jira versions need to be as recent as possible, if not the same¹.
	Apps installed on your source Jira instance are also installed on your target instance².

Instance prep

	Ensure that the naming schemes for user accounts are consistent between the source and target instances³.
	Provision a staging instance to test before importing to a production environment. It should be the same version as your source and target instance to ensure test results are accurate.
	Run the Object Dependencies Report at the source instance to give you visibility of where objects are used or referenced by other objects in your configuration.
	Create backups of your source and target instances⁴.
	Disable outgoing mail for user accounts⁵.
	Run an Import Simulation in the target instance before proceeding with the actual import.

Best practice

	Read the list of supported object types and supported third-party apps to verify that Project Configurator supports the configuration objects that you would like to migrate.
	Follow a tested and defined process for all your migration tasks.
	Limit disruption to users by performing tasks outside of hours. Consider staging the import through separate files and limiting the export of attachments⁶.
	If the export process fails, to save space on your local disk, manually clear these files before launching the export process again.

¹ It is recommended that your Jira versions be the same on both source and target instances. This applies especially to complete project imports. You can import project data from an earlier version of Jira, however the greater the difference in Jira versions between the source and target, the greater the possibility of issues arising from the migration. If your versions are not the same when importing complete projects, ensure that the target instance has the more recent Jira version, as differences between the two could cause the data import run by the built-in Jira data import functionality to fail.

² If an app provides configuration objects, such as custom fields, in the source instance but is not installed on the target instance, errors can occur due to these missing objects. It is also important that the apps on both instances are the same version. Otherwise, the built-in Jira data import functionality that PCJ uses will give errors when importing issue data.

³ You should not have the same user with different user names, e.g. jsmith and jan.smith. If you are using an external user directory such as LDAP or Active Directory, ensure that these users exist in the target instance before the migration.

⁴ Use the Jira built-in XML backups for your source instance if cleaning the instance prior to export.

⁵ To learn how to disable outgoing mail, see Atlassian’s guide to configuring email notifications.

⁶ When making changes to a production environment, define and announce an outage window to avoid performance impacts on users or in case a rollback is required.