Jira Software 8.18.x release notes
1 July 2021
We're pleased to present Jira Software 8.18.
Highlights
More
Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.
Compatible applications
If you're looking for compatible Jira applications, look no further:
Good to know
If you're thinking to move to Data Center, check our recommendations first. See: Infrastructure recommendations for Jira.
Comments reactions DATA CENTER
We're continuing to improve Jira commenting experience. As of this release you can use reactions to comments posted in issues. Use emojis to express interest, provide feedback, or speed up the approval process.
Analyze how your issues change over time
DATA CENTER
We’re also bringing you a better experience with the data pipeline, which allows you to export Jira data for analysis in your favorite business intelligence tool.
Export issue history
To help you dive even deeper into your data, we now export historical issue data. The new Issue history file contains all the information you see in the history tab.
Changes that happened before the scope of the export (before the fromDate, or more than 12 months ago if you did not set a fromDate) are not included.
Exporting the history for all issues will significantly increase the export duration, so you may want to perform the export over a weekend or during a quieter time. If you don’t need this data, you can also choose to exclude it.
Learn more about the data pipeline
Change the export location
You can now use the REST API to set a custom location for the data pipeline to export files to. This is particularly useful if you want to send files directly to the relevant storage for your data lake, such as Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage.
Learn how to change the export location
Stepping up Jira security
We’ve always taken the security of our Server and Data Center products seriously. Our vulnerability management program uses an array of approaches for finding and fixing security issues, and we’re now doubling down in this space to make more improvements faster, especially with security attacks becoming more common and sophisticated.
Upgraded components and libraries
We’ve identified the core components and third-party libraries that we want to upgrade to the newest, most secure versions, and are focusing on this effort over the next few releases. In Jira 8.18, we’ve fixed another bunch of vulnerabilities by upgrading different components and libraries or improving Jira’s codebase, and we’re not stopping at that—more fixes are already waiting for a bugfix release or the next Jira version. If you’d like to learn more about some of the most important libraries we’ve upgraded, see Preparing for Jira 8.18.
Backporting to LTS releases
The stability of our LTS releases is our top priority, but that’s exactly what makes it difficult to backport all these fixes to them. Although we’re focusing on latest versions, we’re doing our best to review, test, test again, and backport critical fixes as we complete them. You can also expect those in the bugfix releases for Jira 8.5 LTS and Jira 8.13 LTS.