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After using youtrack for quite a while my organization is considering a move to JIRA (because of many reasons). However JIRA doesn't seem to include a youtrack importer/migration out of the box (though there seems to be plenty of importers/migrations the other way around).

Has anyone migrated from youtrack to JIRA and have any experience in this?

Edit: To anyone who might have this problem later, my final solution ended up something like this:

  • transfer all "basic" data by hand (user accounts, basic project setup etc)
  • write a small C# program using the atlassian sdk and the youtrack sdk that transfers from one to the other (creating empty placeholder issues if issues was missing due to someone deleting them in youtrack in order to keep numbering).

This approach worked good enough and I managed to transfer pretty much all data without any loss of any very important data (though of course all timestamps are messed up now, but we saw that as an acceptable loss). Important to know is that youtrack handles issues moved from one project to another a bit counter-intuitive (they still show up in their first project even when they're moved away from there, but they have an issue id from their new project - a slight wtf when I ran into that the first time).

Also, while the atlassian sdk did allow me to "spoof" the creator of an issue (that is, being logged in as used A and creating an issue while telling the system that it's actually user B who is creating this issue) it does not allow you to do this with comments. So in order to transfer those properly I had to actually loop through the comments and log in with the corresponding new user and post the comments.

Also, attachments from youtrack was a bit annoying to download, so I ended up having to download those "by hand". :/

But all in all, it was relatively pain-free. Some assembly required, some final touch-ups required, but it was all done within a couple of days.

wasatz
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  • Any chance you can elaborate on some of the reasons. We're looking at going the other way. – Endophage Jan 11 '14 at 21:11
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    @Endophage: Mainly because 1) Youtrack has extremely subpar reporting capabilities compared to JIRA, 2) Youtrack makes it unnecessarily complicated (maybe even impossible?) to create validation rules such as "You must provide a comment when rejecting an issue." 3) YT is _a lot_ less userfriendly when attempting to create rules, validations, workflows. 4) Even though the search function is extremely powerful in YT it's much easier to teach the non-techies JIRA's (at least equally powerful) search since it has a nice UI. (Continued in next comment) – wasatz Jan 13 '14 at 09:35
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    @Endophage: Youtrack is a good piece of software, but it feels extremely developer-centric. This can in some cases be good, but we have plenty of non-developers who can't be bothered to learn the DSL, the search syntax etc and needs a good UI (and also needs good reporting functionality - something that youtrack sorely lacks). Also, JIRA is "old, tried and true" - it's a bit like the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" of issue trackers with plenty of support, awesome integrations, plugins etc. Youtrack feels more of an isolated island (for now) that my organization has outgrown. – wasatz Jan 13 '14 at 09:39
  • FWIW YouTrack now has lots of reports (don't know JIRA) and I believe it's possible to accomplish #2 – nafg Aug 12 '15 at 23:13

2 Answers2

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I had the same problem. After a discussion with JIM (Jira Importer) developer, I used YouTrack Rest API and Python script to make JSON files. Then I used JIM JSON import.

With this solution you can import almost all fields from YT - the standard one and files with description, links between issues and projects and so on...

I don't know if I can push it to GitHub, I have to ask my boss - I did it during my work hours.... But of course you can ask me if you want.

gbn
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Dzinek
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  • Thanks! It would be really nice if you could push it to GitHub if possible. Even if I might not be able to use it as is I would at least have another example to look at :) If not possible then at least I know that this is another possible route. :) – wasatz Feb 05 '14 at 07:38
  • I'm waiting for decision. For now I can tell, that you can clone project from [GitHub JetBrains youtrack-rest-python-library](https://github.com/JetBrains/youtrack-rest-python-library/) and iterate by projects and issues to build JSON structure. Links between issues you should put to another file and import them after all issues from all projects. – Dzinek Feb 06 '14 at 14:13
  • Do you have an update please? This looks really useful – gbn Jun 27 '14 at 11:13
  • @Dzinek Any news on uploading your script to Github? – Tolsto Mar 21 '15 at 18:19
  • @Albert - unfortunately not. This code belongs to company, where i worked. I didn't have an agree, to publish it. But i can try to create such project and maybe at least push some base code how to connect with Jira and do base migration. – Dzinek Mar 27 '15 at 15:04
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The easiest approach is probably to export the data from youtrack into CSV and use the JIRA CSV importer. You may have to modify some of the data to fit the expected format for the CSV importer

mdoar
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  • While that might not be exactly the solution I had hoped for, it is at least a possible solution. Thanks! :) – wasatz Dec 09 '13 at 08:35
  • I've switched the accepted answer because the final solution that I ended up with was actually closer to the one that @Dzinek proposed. Hope you don't mind :) – wasatz Apr 23 '14 at 10:53