I’m looking for methods to move our existing JIRA tickets over to GitLab Enterprise Edition starter version. Our team currently manages two different projects and each project has its own dedicated board in JIRA. We want to transfer all the issue data from these boards to GitLab. Has anyone successfully done this kind of migration before? What tools or approaches work best for this? I’m particularly interested in maintaining the issue history and comments during the transfer process. Any step-by-step guidance would be really helpful since this is my first time doing such a migration.
I migrated two JIRA projects to GitLab last year - learned a few things the hard way. GitLab’s importer handles basic stuff fine, but I’d recommend doing your boards one at a time instead of together. Saves headaches with conflicts.
Custom fields are where things get messy. JIRA’s setup doesn’t translate cleanly to GitLab, so I had to rebuild our workflow labels and milestones before importing. Comments mostly survive intact, but tables and special characters sometimes get scrambled.
Definitely export a JIRA backup first and test everything on a throwaway GitLab project. See how your data looks before committing. And budget extra time - attachments especially slow things down way more than you’d expect.
We did this exact migration six months ago - JIRA Cloud to GitLab EE. The built-in importer works pretty well but you need to prep first. Issue history and comments transfer fine, though rich text formatting gets a bit wonky. Make sure you’ve got API access set up on both platforms and GitLab can actually reach your JIRA instance. Migration speed depends on your connection and how many attachments you have - our 1200 tickets took 8 hours. Wish I’d known this earlier: map your JIRA users to GitLab users first, or you’ll have orphaned issues everywhere. Also figure out how to handle JIRA’s issue types since GitLab just uses labels. The actual migration is easy through GitLab’s interface, but planning ahead is what saves your data.
hey, i did a similar migration and found gitlab’s importer super helpful! just go to project settings and select import data from jira. you’ll need admin rights for both. most of the history came through ok, but some formatting was a bit off. took around 3-4 hrs for ~800 tickets.