How to archive projects in Jira, so they would disappear from Projects picker

Question

We have bunch of old projects in Jira Studio that we want to keep online (in case, if we need to return to them for whatever reason), but I don't want them to appear anywhere in our daily Jira usage, i.e. dashboards, project picker etc.

I followed the official instructions from here, but those archived projects are still visible through Projects picker on top of the page. Is there way to make them disappear?

Answer 1

The navbar only shows the most recently viewed projects. Your old project should eventually disappear from that list, but definitely at its own pace. You have to remove all permissions to the project for them to disappear completely.

Several frustrations such as yours pushed me to develop a series of steps to repeat whenever we have a project that's ready to be archived so that the project is both marked clearly as archived and hidden from daily use:

1. Make sure that are all issues left in the project are either closed or moved to another project

2. Set project lead to the user ‘Retired’ --- we created a fake user called 'Retired' so that when looking at the list of Projects in administration page we can quickly spot the retired ones

3. Set permission scheme to ‘Retired’ --- we defined a permission scheme called 'Retired' that gave all access to the project administrators role and view-only access to the project users role

4. Clear all users from the project roles --- when you need access later on, you can then just edit the project roles for a particular project without affecting all archived projects --- this also allows you to slowly retire a particular project from visibility by slowly removing permissions from groups of users

5. Change workflow scheme to ‘Default’ --- it's very frustrating having to update the workflow that is attached to several archived projects

6. Set project category to ‘Retired’