jira-sync

A suite of utilities to synchronise JIRA projects to the local file system

Installation

gem install jirasync

Usage

Initial Fetch

The following command will start synchronising the project MYPROJ from the server at https://jira.myorganisation.com. The issues from that project will be written to the issues/MYPROJ folder:

jira-sync \
    --baseurl https://jira.myorganisation.com \
    --project MYPROJ  \
    --user jira_user \
    --password jira_password \
    --target issues/MYPROJ/raw \
    fetch

When this passes successfully the issues/MYPROJ/raw directory will contain the following structure:

MYPROJ-1.json
MYPROJ-2.json
MYPROJ-3.json
MYPROJ-4.json
…
sync_state.json

Each issue file contains a pretty-printed json representation of the ticket. The modified date of the files is set to the value of the updated field of the corresponding ticket, so that a makefile can be used to render the json files incrementally into a more readable representation.

The sync_state.json file contains information about the last sync, such as the time and errors that occurred.

Updating

The following statement will sync issues that have changed or where added during the last sync:

jira-sync \
    --baseurl https://jira.myorganisation.com \
    --project MYPROJ  \
    --user jira_user \
    --password jira_password \
    --target issues/MYPROJ/raw \
    update

Fetching and Storing Attachments

Passing in the --store-attachments option leads to attachments being fetched and stored in the local filesystem. They will we be stored in the attachments/ sub-directory of the target directory.

Formatting Issues

While JSON files are very handy to use in code, they are not very readable. The jira-format-issues command formats JSON issues to markdown. It is invoked as follows:

jira-format-issues \
    --source  issues/MYPROJ/raw\
    --target  issues/MYPROJ/markdown

This will create the following structure in the issues/MYPROJ/markdown:

MYPROJ-1.md
MYPROJ-2.md
MYPROJ-3.md
MYPROJ-4.md
…

The individual files look like this:

[MYPROJ-1](https://jira.myorganisation.com/browse/MYPROJ-1): Build a working System
===================================================================================

Type
:   Story

Status
:   Closed

Reporter
:   fleipold

Labels
:   triaged

Updated
:   20. Jan 2014 11:30 (UTC)

Created
:   01. Aug 2013 12:29 (UTC)


Description
-----------

The myproj system shall be built to be *delpoyable* and *working*.


Comments
--------

### fleipold - 20. Jan 2014 12:19 (UTC):

Is this still relevant?

These files can be easily searched by ensuring they get indexed by a desktop search engine, e.g. spotlight on the Mac.

There is also the possibility to render custom jira fields by supplying a custom data file, which declares simple data fields which are rendered as definitions at the top of the ticket and sections that are rendered as one or more paragraphs with a heading. Here is an example file, custom-data.json:

{
    "simple_fields" : {
         "Audience" : ["customfield_10123", "value"]
    },
    "sections" : {
         "Release Notes" : ["customfield_10806"]
    }
}

This file can be passed in like this:

jira-format-issues \
    --source  issues/MYPROJECT/json \
    --target  issues/MYPROJECT/markdown \
    --custom-data-path custom-data.json

Motivation

Having a local, unix-friendly copy of all tickets to avoid JIRA performance issues and make information available offline.

Potential Future Work

• Make progress bar work
• Make output less noisy
• Download attachments
• Produce tabular output
• Deal with authentication problems explicitly
• Remove tickets that have been moved to a different project
• Use OAuth authentication