How to migrate from Bugzilla to Jira

Our company has used Bugzilla to track the bugs in various products for years. With the recent move to Jira to manage our projects and track tasks, it was time to say goodbye to the Bugzilla and centralise the issue backlogs.

As we have had a long list of active and resolved issues in various projects, I decided to import all the issues to Jira to keep the historical record of what has happened. Generally it is a straight forward process if you have done the preparation.

Software versions:
Bugzilla: Ver. 4.4.6
Jira: Ver 7.2
Bugzilla Database: mysql
Jira Database: mysql

Jira comes with various plugins to import issues from different servers. It also includes a plugin for Bugzilla.
PreparationFor Jira plugin to access to the Bugzilla information it needs user name and password with read grants on the database. Usually the users in the mysql are set up to access to the server locally only. You will get an error if try to access to the Bugzilla with a user that is set to local access.
Below step will make sure you can complete the migration without problem.
Login to the machine that has mysql server for Bugzilla. then run below commands. You will need root access to the mysql. I create a new temporary user rather than altering the current users.

$ mysql -u root -p ############
mysql> CREATE USER 'jiraimport'@'%'IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON bugs.* TO  'jiraimport'@'%'IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
mysql> flush privileges;

“bugs” is the name of the database Bugzilla is using.
That’s all you need to do on Bugzilla side. The rest of the steps will be done through Jira.
A user name and password for the Bugzilla front will be needed.

Import Process

Make sure Bugzilla server is up and running and also the Jira server can access it through the network.

Go to System –> and select External System Import from the left menu under the Import and Export section.

From the list of the plugins select Bugzilla as shown in below picture

enter the information about the Bugzilla server. as below picture shows. Make sure you tick the “Specify credentials” from the menu

Select the products you want to migrate (products will be come Projects in Jira)

You can map products to an existing project, or create a new project in Jira or skip them.

Then you need to decide on mapping the custom fields.

In next step you decide on importing the Bugzilla fields as they are or map them into Jira fields.

In next step you will go through mapping the field values that you selected in previous step.

Last step is to select the links type mapping

That is it after clicking on Begin Import button it will start importing all the bugs and their associated comments, attachments and records into the Jira.

Depending on the amount of information you have this might take a while. Mine took around 1 hour. So grab a cup of coffee and be patient.

In next step, it will ask you to decide on what to do with the users. All these extra users were previous employees so I left them inactive. The good thing is they are not counted against your license and yet you can have their names next to the comments they have made and bugs they have work on.

In last page it will give you a summary of what happened.

The dependency links error shown below are related to the bugs in projects that I decided not to import. Somehow it still tries to import the links related to them and obviously fails. Safely we can ignore these errors.

That’s all enjoy it. All the components, versions, etc. also created in Jira. Not bad 🙂

2 Comments

Sudheer says:

03 May 2019 at 6:18 pm

Hello Saeed,

I am not able to see find bugzilla plugin in my Jira Cloud, recently I created Jira cloud account and I followed all your steps but I am not getting bugzilla plugin in Jira cloud.

AKTAR ALAM says:

09 Apr 2020 at 1:45 am

Same here, not able to see bugzilla plugin.
It says CSV, JSON only

How to migrate from Bugzilla to Jira

Preparation

Import Process

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