Anonymizing JIRA exports

Sometimes, in order to troubleshoot your JIRA instance, you need to provide a data dump for Atlassian or another service vendor so that they can recreate your environment to reproduce the problem locally. If you have sensitive information in your JIRA, this can be troublesome. In this recipe, we will look at how we can anonymize our data in JIRA.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need to use the JIRA Anonymizer utility. You can download it from the following link:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/download/attachments/139008/jira_anon.zip?version=1&modificationDate=1367988226752&api=v2

To run the Anonymizer utility, make sure that the following prerequisites are met on the machine you are running the utility from:

• Make sure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set properly
• Running the java -version command will display the correct version of Java

How to do it…

Perform the following steps to anonymize your JIRA export:

1. Unzip the jira_anon.zip file to a temporary directory.
2. Copy your JIRA XML export (entities.xml) to the temporary directory.
3. Open up a command prompt and go to the temporary directory where the joost.jar file resides.
4. Run the anonymizer application with the java -Xmx512m -jar joost.jar entities.xml anon.stx > anon-entities.xml command, where entities.xml is the name of the original XML export and anon-entities.xml is the new anonymized XML file to be created.

   Note

   JIRA's XML backup utility produces a ZIP file that contains two XML files; do not anonymize activeobjects.xml.

How it works…

The JIRA Anonymizer protects sensitive information in your JIRA by going through your JIRA XML export and replacing values from many fields in JIRA with a string of the character x. The list of fields that are to be anonymized include the following:

• Issue summary, environment, and description
• Comments, work logs, and change logs
• The project description
• Configuration scheme description such as the notification and permission schemes
• Attachment filenames
• Text custom field types

Depending on the size of the export, the utility may require additional memory for processing. The -Xmx parameter indicates the amount of memory to allocate, so in the preceding steps, we allocated 512 MB of memory to run the utility.