Long live OnDemand JIRA

The old OpenQuote JIRA is dead. Long live the OpenQuote JIRA.

I'd been putting off migrating our old JIRA to Atlassian's OneDemand service (which I blogged about a while ago). But now it is done, and it turned out to be a lot simpler than expected.

In principal migrating between instances of JIRA is easy. You simply use the admin functions to export content from one server, and the import it into another. If you have a complex setup there can be more to it, but our setup is simple so that should be all that's necessary. However, our old server was very old. We were running version 3 of JIRA and the OnDemand server is running version 5. You can't import version 3 format exports into version 5.

Thankfully, Atlassian provide very detailed docs on how upgrade between version. Very detailed and very copious docs which rather put me off. But a couple of days ago I found myself with a spare hour or two so I took a punt at it. And in that couple of hours the job was done.

All I needed to do was to create an export from the old server. Install a standalone JIRA 4.0 and import into it. Then immediately export again from that server. This gave me a version 4 export which imported without issues into the OnDemand system.

The URL remains the same: http://openquotecommunity.org/jira, it now redirects to OnDemand. All users have also been migrated. In fact even the site logo and look and feel customisations came across too. Can't be bad.