Startup check: Jira build version

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Platform notice: Server and Data Center only. This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Server and Data Center platforms.

Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

During installation, upgrade or startup, Jira performs a number of checks. The Jira Build Version check verifies that the version of the data stored in the database can be used by the version of Jira that is about run. If the check fails, Jira will fail to start. This is to prevent potential data corruption.

Cause

While this problem should never happen, there are a few ways to get your data and Jira instance into this state:

  • You may have tried a newer version of Jira in your test, staging, or dev environment, but forgot to change the database config, and ran it against your production database. This would have upgraded your data.
  • You upgraded Jira, and then tried to downgrade.
  • You are migrating the data from an existing Jira instance that used a newer version of Jira than the instance you are migrating to
  • You are migrating from Jira Cloud to Jira Server

Impact

The Jira instance must not be started without further checks. As different versions of Jira may rely on different structures in the database, running Jira with the wrong version of database can result in severe data loss. Certain database tables may also not be available, making it impossible for Jira to run.

Resolution

The best, and safest solution is to upgrade Jira to the latest version. This updates and syncs your data and Jira version back to the same level. A full guide on how to upgrade your Jira instance can be found here. Jira Server Upgrade Guide.


Alternative Resolution: Downgrade your data

An alternative resolution is to try to downgrade your data to a version that is compatible with your current Jira version.

To do this, add the -Djira.downgrade.allowed=true parameter to Jira according to the steps of our Setting properties and options on startup documentation, then restart the application.

 It will check if Jira is able to downgrade your data, and if so, will attempt a downgrade. This is not guaranteed to be available for your setup.

Note

If you already ran into this issue, your logs will hint if this option will be available. It is not always possible to downgrade your data so running this command may not bring any results but just yield the same error message again.


Alternative Resolution: Database backup

If you have a database backup with an older data version, you can try to use this to fix your database.

Important

 If you do not know if your back up has an older working data version do not try this.

Warning

Using a backup will lead to data loss! All data between the time the backup was done and now will be lost!



Last modified on Jan 29, 2024

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