JIRA Server Administration - JIRA 6.x Administration Topic - page 20

How to do it…
To manually upgrade your JIRA instance, perform the following steps:
1. Take your current JIRA offline.
2. Install the new version of JIRA.
3. Edit the jira-application.properties file in this version of JIRA, loc-
ated in the JIRA_INSTALL/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes direct-
ory.
4. Update the value of jira.home to the current JIRA_HOME directory or to a
copy of that directory.
5. Copy any modified files.
6. Start up the new JIRA.
7. Update the add-ons once JIRA starts successfully.
8. Remove the previous installation directory to avoid confusion.