Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 9. Remote Access to JIRA

Overview

No man is an island, wrote John Donne, and this is doubly true of JIRA and almost every other application you may administer. Users want their data to appear in multiple places, administrators want to manage applications from a single place, and anyone may want to run some scripts to make lots of changes at once.

All of these require remote access to JIRA, where remote access is defined loosely as using JIRA without a browser.

This chapter covers a variety of remote access methods for JIRA. The quick summary is that REST is the way that most remote access to JIRA occurs in 2015, with a small amount of SOAP access in older installations. SOAP access was deprecated in JIRA 6.0 and removed in JIRA 7.0.

A good starting place for REST information in the Atlassian documentation is https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-apis/jira-rest-apis.

Email

Email is one of the simplest ways to use JIRA remotely. Issues can be created and then comments added to them using the standard JIRA mail service and mail handlers. Email is a function commonly already found in many applications.¹ Balanced against the simplicity of email are its limitations:

• Email messages have limited structure. Only the To, Cc, Subject, From fields and any attachments are easily separated from the email body.

• There’s no real guarantee about who most email is from, so authentication is hard.

• Email is asynchronous and unreliable, in the sense that retrying failed messages is slow and ...