Use Case 1: Carrying Configuration Changes from Development to Production

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Suppose you have a development instance (let's call it DEV) where some changes have been made to the configuration of some projects. End users have seen and approved these changes and now you want to transport these changes to your production instance (which we'll call PROD).

Setup & Best Practice

Ensure Project Configurator is installed on both your development (source) and production (target) instances. You can install Project Configurator either through the UPM or by downloading the app from the Atlassian Marketplace. Apply your license to the target instance only – Project Configurator will allow you to export without a license on the source instance. If you need information on setting up a staging server for Jira, see Atlassian's Establishing Staging Server Environments for Jira Applications.

While we’ve tried to make Project Configurator as easy to use as possible, there are a few things you should do to ensure a successful import.

Make full backups of your source and target databases including attachments.
Disable Outgoing Mail to not spam users.
Before exporting, run the Object Dependencies report to give you visibility of where objects are used or referenced by other objects in your configuration.
Before importing, run the Import Conflict Detection report.
Run a simulated import and verify that the import will make the changes that you expect.
Perform the import on a test instance before moving your changes to a live environment.
Perform the configuration promotion out of office hours (it might take some time).

Exporting

Open your DEV Jira instance.
Select Add-ons from the Jira Administration menu, then select Export Projects under Project Configurator in the left sidebar.
On the Export Projects page, make your selection(s). Choose Configuration Only below the project list and then click Export Options.
On the next page, you can fine tune some export options. NB: It is worth noting that the default settings will work well for 90% of exports.
On the resulting page, click Export Configuration Only.The app downloads an XML file for the selected projects. Save the file in an easy to remember and find location.

Importing

Open a Jira session in the PROD instance.
Select Add-ons from the Jira Administration menu, then select Import Projects under Project Configurator in the left sidebar.
On the Import Projects page, click Browse and locate the XML file you exported from DEV.
Click Import Options to refine what to import. See Selecting Import Options for details on each option.
Select the First Run a Simulated Configuration Import option. This is highly recommended to allow you to test the import prior to committing the changes to your production instance.
Click Import Project Configuration. This launches a simulated configuration load. The results page shows a simulation of the operations that would be performed on instance PROD when that configuration file is imported. As it is a simulation, none of those changes have actually been applied.
Take some time to review this information, and check if those changes are aligned with what you expect.
If everything is fine, and you do not find any unexpected change, then you can launch the actual import. Click Apply Configuration.
Once the import has run, you will see a the final import report. This has the same format as the simulated report making it easy for you to understand what changes were implemented.

Congratulations!

If you followed along, you have just successfully transferred your first configuration changes from a Dev instance to Production! If you would like to watch a demo video of this process, follow the link below.

Project Configurator for Jira

Page tree

Setup & Best Practice

Exporting

Importing

Congratulations!