Jira migration tomorrow (31. August)

Update 31.08.2022:
The migration was completed today, and the projects should now be available for all users at https://dhis2.atlassian.net/jira.

We are still making a few final changes, including redirecting the old URL to the new instance.

If you have any problems accessing the projects, please let us know in this thread, or send a direct message to me.


Tomorrow, 31. August, we will be migrating the DHIS2 Jira from our self-hosted instance to the cloud. We estimate the entire migration will take around 10 hours. During this time, the projects we are migrating will be unavailable, and you might experience general slowness on Jira.

Existing Jira users will have to create a new Atlassian account, which is how users will be interact with the cloud-hosted instance.

New accounts can be created here: https://id.atlassian.com/signup
The cloud instance will be hosted here: https://dhis2.atlassian.net/jira

For more information, you can find a more in-depth explanation below.

The Projects
The team has already migrated quite a few internal projects to the cloud, and some public projects which you might already know. This time we will be migrating our main project “DHIS 2 Software” as well as our Android projects, which means this migration will affect most people - hence the announcement to inform everyone. The following is a complete list of projects migrating this time around:

  • DHIS 2 Software (DHIS2)
  • Android App for DHIS2 (ANDROAPP)
  • Android SDK for DHIS2 (ANDROSDK)
  • Maintenance of Android Apps (ACA)

These projects will be unavailable during the migration.

The Migration process

  1. When we migrate a project, we make the project readOnly. This means users can no longer create, update, comment or transition issues within the project. This is to avoid a discrepancy between the two Jira instances during the migration.

  2. When we set up a migration, automated integrity checks are run to make sure all data is ready to be migrated. Most notably, this will affect users. Jira cloud does not allow users with duplicate emails to be migrated, which has been a common issue in our self-hosted Jira instance. As a result, we have merged, removed and fixed user accounts as needed. See the section about user accounts further down for more info.

  3. User permissions for projects are reset in many cases after the migration. This means after the migration of data completes, we need to re-configure the projects so all users have correct access to the project. Any users who end up without appropriate access, please let us know.

  4. The final part of the migration process is to redirect urls to the old Jira instance to the cloud instance. This way, existing links to issues will seamlessly be opened in the new Jira cloud instance, and not in the self-hosted instance.

We have been testing and working on migrating the DHIS 2 Software projects for a while, and our estimates are currently that the entire migration process will take around 10 hours, including configuration and redirection.

Duplicate user accounts
Jira Cloud has its own user directory. This means most people will need to create their own Atlassian user account to be able to access the DHIS2 Jira. This is free, and our Jira is set up to accept any Atlassian user as of now. As long as your Jira Cloud account uses the same email as your old Jira account, you should retain access to any old issues, comments and watch lists as you had before.

With this new user directory, Jira has imposed a new restriction to user accounts. This restriction is that all emails should be unique in the system. Previously, our own Jira installation allowed users to have the same emails, or variations of the same emails (IE. me@dhis2.org and me+something@dhis2.org). With the migration, this is no longer allowed. We had to make three changes to accommodate that: Users with identical emails are merged together if sensible. Users with invalid emails were fixed where possible and in cases where these two options were not possible, and the accounts were inactive forever (never logged in) or inactive for more than a few years we had to remove them completely.

Support
If you have issues accessing Jira, or performing certain operations after the migration (Starting 1. September), please let us know through one of our channels. We will actively be checking the DHIS2 Community for Jira-related posts in the immediate time following this migration.

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Thanks for sharing!

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