JIRA 5.0 Upgrade Notes

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Upgrading from JIRA 4.4.x to 5.0

Please follow the instructions in the general Upgrading JIRA guide, as well as the JIRA 5.0-specific instructions in the sections below. The general 'Upgrading JIRA' guide contains important tasks that are essential for getting your upgraded JIRA installation to work correctly and if necessary, migrating existing configurations.

The 'trackbacks' feature has been removed

The trackback feature has been removed in JIRA 5.0 and its functionality has been replaced solely by remote issue links.

JIRA servers using Oracle databases require additional configuration

Due to Active Objects changes in JIRA 5.0, any customers with a JIRA server connected to an Oracle database will need to ensure that the database user account (through which JIRA connects to Oracle) has the create sequence and create trigger Oracle database permissions. To apply these permissions, execute the following Oracle SQL commands with the relevant database user account, before upgrading JIRA to version 5.0:

grant create sequence to <user>;
grant create trigger to <user>;

Mail handlers are no longer configured as a JIRA Service

The introduction of the mail handler wizard in JIRA 5.0 means that after upgrading to JIRA 5.0, any existing mail handlers or any new mail handlers created will no longer be configurable through JIRA's Services page. Instead, all mail handlers are created and edited through the Mail Handlers section of the Incoming Mail page. See Configure a mail handler for details.

Project key length restricted to 10 characters for new projects

When creating new projects, the project key length is now restricted to a maximum of ten characters. This will not affect existing projects.
This restriction is scheduled to be removed in JIRA 6.0 and later (see JRA-28577 - Getting issue details... STATUS

GreenHopper plugin

Please note that JIRA 5.0 is only compatible with GreenHopper 5.9.

The GreenHopper plugin is no longer bundled with JIRA. Instead, please use the JIRA Universal Plugin Manager to update your GreenHopper plugin.

JIRA Toolkit plugin

From JIRA 5.0, version 0.21 or later of the JIRA Toolkit plugin is required.

Hence, if you are using any of the custom fields provided by this plugin and want to ensure that messages are always shown to users upon the creation of issues, please ensure that these fields are made 'required' in your field configurations:

  • Message Custom Field (for edit)
  • Velocity processed Message Custom Field (for edit)

Other plugins

(warning) PLEASE BE AWARE — JIRA 5.0 introduces several changes that may break existing plugins which are not bundled with JIRA.

If you have a developed a plugin, then please read the Preparing for JIRA 5.0 section of our developer documentation site for more details. This documentation describes changes in JIRA 5.0 which may affect the compatibility of your plugin with JIRA 5.0.

If you are using a plugin developed by a third party, please check with the plugin's author to see if the plugin has been tested with JIRA 5.0.

Translations

Please note that unlike earlier versions of JIRA, JIRA 5.0 ships with a reduced set of translations, which may not be the most up-to-date available. The most recent translations for French, German, Spanish, Japanese and other languages can be obtained easily via the Universal Plugin Manager by searching for "language pack". See Managing JIRA's Plugins for details on using this feature.

You can also download and install these language packs manually from our Plugin Exchange site.

(tick) Language packs for other languages which are not available through the Universal Plugin Manager or our Plugin Exchange site can be downloaded from our translation site (https://translations.atlassian.com/).

Licensing changes

Due to JIRA licensing changes introduced at the time of the release of JIRA 5.0, some customers may wish to modify their JIRA license to one with a lower user count. Since the number of users that count towards your JIRA license is defined by the number of users with the JIRA Users global permission, some customers who upgrade to JIRA 5.0 may experience problems with their users being unable to create issues (due to license counts being exceeded).

Customers can overcome this issue by reducing the number of users that count towards their JIRA license. See Updating your JIRA License Details for details on how to do this.

Naming convention changes for JIRA distributions

In versions of JIRA prior to 5.0, JIRA distributions had the following naming conventions:

  • JIRA Standalone — JIRA distributions that were 'bundled' with their own Apache Tomcat application server and were installed from either an executable or archive file.
  • JIRA WAR — JIRA distributions that could be customised, then built for deployment to a separate Apache Tomcat application server installation.

Several customers misconstrued the meaning of term Standalone which was used to describe JIRA distributions bundled with their own Apache Tomcat application server. Hence, from JIRA 5.0:

  • The naming convention for JIRA WAR distributions will not change. The installation files for these distributions include 'WAR' or 'war' in their file names.
  • JIRA distributions which are bundled with their own Apache Tomcat application server are referred to as 'recommended' JIRA distributions (in the documentation) and the installation files for these distributions do not use a distinct term to distinguish them from JIRA WAR distributions.
  • The installation files for 'recommended' JIRA distributions include:
    • JIRA Windows 32-/64-bit installer
    • JIRA Linux 32-/64-bit installer
    • JIRA zip/tar.gz archives

For installation instructions for 'recommended' JIRA distributions, see Installing JIRA. For installation instructions for JIRA WAR distributions, see Installing JIRA WAR.

Known issues

Before you begin the upgrade, please check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of JIRA after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the JIRA Knowledge Base. Please check for known issues and follow the instructions to apply any necessary patches.

If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.

When creating an issue in Internet Explorer 8, the 'Issue Type' field behaves differently

Due to existing behaviour in Internet Explorer 8, when creating an issue, JIRA does not select the default issue type for the specified project on the Create Issue dialog box or page if you have no history of having previously created issues. Instead, the issue type at the top of the dropdown list is selected if the user has not previously created an issue. See JRA-27029 for more information.

Performance degradation when users view lists of issues sorted by date from large JIRA sites

On large JIRA sites, users may experience performance degradation in the following situations:

  • Viewing search results in either the issue navigator or issue filters, which retrieve more than 25,000 issues sorted by date.
  • For projects with more than 25,000 issues, viewing sections of the summary page that list issues sorted by date - for example, the 'Issues: Updated recently' section.

See JRA-27206 for more information.

Upgrading to JIRA 5.0 (or later) from JIRA versions 4.0.0 through to 4.3.x

In addition to the points listed above, please read the Important Version-Specific Upgrade Notes for every version of JIRA you are skipping.

Upgrading to JIRA 5.0 (or later) from a JIRA version prior to 4.0.0

Please be aware that you cannot directly upgrade to JIRA 5.0 or later from a version prior to 4.0.0 (for example from JIRA 3.10.3). Instead, you will need to upgrade your JIRA installation to a JIRA 4.x version first before you can upgrade to JIRA 5.0 or later. The latest JIRA 4.4.x version is recommended for this process. The following resources in the JIRA 4.4.x documentation are good places to start for upgrading to the latest JIRA 4.4.x release:

You can then follow the JIRA 5.0 Upgrade Notes (above) to upgrade your JIRA 4.x installation to JIRA 5.0.

Last modified on Apr 8, 2014

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