Copying configuration settings between Jira instances

If you have a controlled IT environment where changes need to go through development, testing/staging, and production processes, then, without a doubt, you will know how painful it is to promote Jira configuration changes across different environments. Since Jira does not provide a way to export configurations out of the box, all changes will need to be manually applied to each environment, which is both time-consuming and error-prone.

In this recipe, we will look at using a specialized tool that can help to make this process easier.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need to have the Configuration Manager for Jira add-on installed on both the source Jira instance as well as the target Jira instance. You can install it directly from the Universal Plugin Manager, or download it from the following link: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.botronsoft.jira.configurationmanager.

How to do it...

The Configuration Manager for Jira add-on requires you to first create a snapshot. A snapshot contains all the configuration settings you want to copy over to a different Jira instance.

You can create two types of snapshot:

• System: This includes all configurations in Jira.
• Project: This includes only configurations required for the selected project.

Proceed with the following steps to create a configuration snapshot:

1. Navigate to Administration > Configuration Management > Snapshots.
2. Click on the Add Snapshot button.
3. Opt to create either a System Configuration or Project Configuration snapshot.
4. Enter a name for the snapshot.
5. Click on the Create button. The following screenshot shows the details of the snapshot we created:

Having created the snapshot, there are several ways in which we can promote and deploy changes to another Jira instance. We can either download the snapshot ZIP file and upload it or link the two Jira instances together with Application Link and load the snapshot remotely. We will use the snapshot file option in this recipe. Proceed with the following steps to deploy a snapshot:

1. Log in to the other Jira instance as an administrator.
2. Navigate to Administration > Configuration Management > Deploy.
3. Select the From Snapshot File option.
4. Choose the snapshot ZIP file.
5. Click on the Deploy link to start the deployment.

The add-on will walk you through a deployment wizard, where it will analyze the contents of the snapshot and determine whether your current Jira system meets all the necessary requirements. For example, in the following screenshot, it has informed us that there is an add-on version mismatch:

After the add-on has determined that all the requirements are met, it will provide a quick summary of all the changes that will be applied (seen in the following screenshot). This is a good time to review the list of items to make sure we are not introducing unwanted changes accidentally, as shown in the following screenshot:

If everything looks good, we can finish migrating the configuration changes and deploy them to the target instance.