Quick Start for Jira Admins

Upon installing the Attachment Housekeeper, a global attachment housekeeping policy is created and linked to ALL projects for you.

You can follow this quick start guide to start cleaning up attachments you do not need.

As an example for this quick start guide, we will be cleaning up our project IT Support (ITHELP) with many old zip and log files.

Steps

1. Go to Administrator > Issue Archiver

2. Go to the Housekeeping Policies page. You will see the created policy Global Policy #1 created and associated to all your projects.

   

3. Click on Create New Policy. We will be creating a new policy to associate to our project.

   

   1. For our example, we want to clear out our log and zip files from older issues which have been resolved. However, we want to keep some files which are relatively smaller (less than 3 MB). Additionally, we do not want to delete files which may have been mentioned in its issue description or comments, so we can continue using them for reference. Therefore, we will use the following criteria:

      1. JQL: resolution is not EMPTY AND updated < startOfYear(-3)

      2. Size is: More than or equal to 3 MB

      3. Has file extension: log, zip

      4. Special Handling: Exclude files mentioned in issue comments and description

Feel free to change the criteria to suit your needs. For more information on how to define rules, please check out Managing Attachment Housekeeper Policies: Explanation of Fields

Note that you do not need to restrict the JQL to a certain project (i.e. project = KEY) as it is automatically handled by Attachment Housekeeper based on the projects the policy is associated with.

4. Save your policy. You are able to view the policy info by clicking on its respective info button.

   

5. Navigate to the Project Settings > Housekeeping Policy page of the project you would like to associate your new policy with. In this case, we would like to housekeep the ITHELP project. You will notice that it is currently associated with Global Policy #1.
   

   

6. Click on ⚙️ Actions > Change Linked Policy.

7. Look for your newly created policy. You will see the respective policy rules whenever you select a policy. When you have found your policy that you want to use, click on Use this Policy.

   

8. You should see that the current policy is now your selected policy. Click on Run Policy to start deleting attachments from all the associated projects which match the criteria stated in your rules.

9. You can view the attachments which have been marked by the policy under Marked Attachments in the sidebar. These attachments will no longer be accessible while they remain marked.

   

You can unmark attachments here if you think you still need them. They will become accessible to you again.

10. The marked attachments are also shown in a panel within their respective issues.

    

Well done!

We have just created our own housekeeping policy and used it to identify and mark zip and log files from issues we are no longer looking at.

What’s Next?

1. Your marked attachments are kept in Jira by Attachment Housekeeper until their “Retained Until” date. Take this time to review the marked attachments.

   1. Users can play their part in helping to review attachments in issues that they still use.

2. Edit the Global Policy #1 to suit your needs once familiarised to start housekeeping all your projects with one single policy.

   1. You can also define a variety of housekeeping policies and associate them with different projects to suit each project’s needs.

3. Learn about the Attachment Housekeeper Settings, where you can

   1. Enable the setting Delete Attachments so that attachments can be permanently deleted from Jira, freeing up disk space for everyone.

   2. Increase the limit of marked attachments that can be marked per run.

4. Learn more about Managing Attachment Housekeeper Policies, and set a new default policy for new projects going forward.