Difficulty migrating from Bitbucket to Jira

[AndyP]

My team has an existing bitbucket project, using Git and issues. I'm attempting to move the issues to Jira Cloud. I have exported the issues from Bitbucket to JSON and have attempted to import them into Jira using the guide here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiracloud/importing-data-from-json-776636779.html

I'm assuming that the db-jira-cloud.json file from the bitbucket export is the correct file to use. The problem with using this is that many of the fields in the file are incorrect.

For example, the issues in the bitbucket project use the statuses "New", "Open", "Closed", and "Resolved". However, in the export there are only "Backlog", "Selected For Development" and "Done". The issue types are similarly mismatched with the original tickets.

Is there any way to get an export from Bitbucket that can be imported into Jira without losing any information? Or am I going about this in completely the wrong way?

[Matt Robertson · Accepted solution]

Hi @AndyP 

Yep, the db-jira-cloud.json is the right file to use and you're approaching it the right way.  The doco for export is here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/export-issue-data-to-jira-cloud-993930294.html .

We have a problem that the issueTypes and statuses have to already exist in Jira before issues can be imported using them.  Everyone has a different Jira configuration and we don't know which Jira the issues go to when the export is generated, so we chose the most generic issue types and statuses we could.  I agree that it's frustrating that they don't match what's in bitbucket, we have plans to improve the export in the future but that doesn't help you right now.

You have a couple of options:

* The easiest would be to create a new project in Jira with the needed issueTypes and statuses, then use the bulk move function in Jira to move all the issues into that project.   Bulk move allows you to change the issue type and transition the status.

* The other option would be to modify the db-jira-cloud.json file so the issues have the right statuses and issue types before importing them into Jira.

I would use bulk move before modifying the json can be fiddly and time consuming to get it right.  The documentation on the issue import json format is on the page you linked (here).

[AndyP]

Thanks for the advice. I was able to import successfully by creating all the same statuses and issue types in Jira as I had in bitbucket and also modifying the JSON file to match.

The process was a bit more involved than expected, so I'm happy to hear that there are plans to make this easier in the future.

[Rajesh Viswanathan]

Thanks for the sharing the experience