Simple command line client for Atlassian's Jira service written in Go.

When this tool was initial written the "username" parameter was widely used in the Atlassian API. Due to GDPR restrictions this parameter was been almost completely phased out other then V1 login. The "--user" field is still provided as a default global, however moving forward any usage of this field should be phased out in favor of the "--login" option.

Commands which previously took a username will now expect an email address such as watch, create, assign, etc...

You can download one of the pre-built binaries for go-jira here.

You can build and install the official repository with Go (before running the below command, ensure you have GO111MODULE=on set in your environment):

go get github.com/go-jira/jira/cmd/jira

This will checkout this repository into $GOPATH/src/github.com/go-jira/jira/, build, and install it.

It should then be available in $GOPATH/bin/jira.

Since go-jira is built with the "kingpin" golang command line library we support bash/zsh shell completion automatically:

• https://github.com/alecthomas/kingpin/tree/v2.2.5#bashzsh-shell-completion

For example, in bash, adding something along the lines of:

eval "$(jira --completion-script-bash)"

to your bashrc, or .profile (assuming go-jira binary is already in your path) will cause jira to offer tab completion behavior.

go-jira uses a configuration hierarchy. When loading the configuration from disk it will recursively look through all parent directories in your current path looking for a .jira.d directory. If your current directory is not a child directory of your homedir, then your homedir will also be inspected for a .jira.d directory. From all of .jira.d directories discovered go-jira will load a <command>.yml file (ie for jira list it will load .jira.d/list.yml) then it will merge in any properties from the config.yml if found. The configuration properties found in a file closest to your current working directory will have precedence. Properties overridden with command line options will have final precedence.

The complicated configuration hierarchy is used because go-jira attempts to be context aware. For example, if you are working on a "foo" project and you cd into your project workspace, wouldn't it be nice if jira ls automatically knew to list only issues related to the "foo" project? Likewise when you cd to the "bar" project then jira ls should only list issues related to "bar" project. You can do this with by creating a configuration under your project workspace at ./.jira.d/config.yml that looks like:

project: foo

You will need to specify your local jira endpoint first, typically in your homedir like:

mkdir ~/.jira.d

cat <<EOM >~/.jira.d/config.yml
endpoint: https://jira.mycompany.com
EOM

Then use jira login to authenticate yourself as $USER. To change your username, use the -u CLI flag or set user: in your config.yml

If the .jira.d/config.yml file is executable, then go-jira will attempt to execute the file and use the stdout for configuration. You can use this to customize templates or other overrides depending on what type of operation you are running. For example if you would like to use the "table" template when ever you run jira ls, then you can create a template like this:

#!/bin/sh

echo "endpoint: https://jira.mycompany.com"
echo "editor: emacs -nw"

case $JIRA_OPERATION in
    list)
      echo "template: table";;
esac

Or if you always set the same overrides when you create an issue for your project you can do something like this:

#!/bin/sh
echo "project: GOJIRA"

case $JIRA_OPERATION in
    create)
        echo "assignee: $USER"
        echo "watchers: mothra"
        ;;
esac

You can now create custom commands for jira just by editing your .jira.d/config.yml config file. These commands are effectively shell-scripts that can have documented options and arguments. The basic format is like:

custom-commands:
  - command1
  - command2

Where the individual commands are maps with these keys:

• name: string [required] This is the command name, so for jira foobar you would have name: foobar
• help: string This is help message displayed in the usage for the command
• hidden: bool This command will be hidden from users, but still executable. Sometimes useful for constructing complex commands where one custom command might call another.
• default: bool Use this for compound command groups. If you wanted to have jira foo bar and jira foo baz you would have two commands with name: foo bar and name: foo baz. Then if you wanted jira foo baz to be called by default when you type jira foo you would set default: true for that custom command.
• options: list This is the list of possible option flags that the command will accept
• args: list This is the list of command arguments (like the ISSUE) that the command will accept.
• aliases: string list: This is a list of alternate names that the user can provide on the command line to run the same command. Typically used to shorten the command name or provide alternatives that users might expect.
• script: string [required] This is the script that will be executed as the action for this command. The value will be treated as a template and substitutions for options and arguments will be made before executing.

These are possible keys under the command options property:

• name: string [required] Name of the option, so name: foobar will result in --foobar option.
• help: string The help message displayed in usage for the option.
• type: string: The type of the option, can be one of these values: BOOL, COUNTER, ENUM, FLOAT32, FLOAT64, INT8, INT16, INT32, INT64, INT, STRING, STRINGMAP, UINT8, UINT16, UINT32, UINT64 and UINT. Most of these are primitive data types an should be self-explanatory. The default type is STRING. There are some special types:
  • COUNTER will be an integer type that increments each time the option is used. So something like --count --count will results in {{options.count}} of 2.
  • ENUM type is used with the enum property. The raw type is a string and must be one of the values listed in the enum property.
  • STRINGMAP is a string => string map with the format of KEY=VALUE. So --override foo=bar --override bin=baz will allow for {{options.override.foo}} to be bar and {{options.override.bin}} to be baz.
• short: char The single character option to be used so short: c will allow for -c.
• required: bool Indicate that this option must be provided on the command line. Conflicts with the default property.
• default: any Specify the default value for the option. Conflicts with the required property.
• hidden: bool Hide the option from the usage help message, but otherwise works fine. Sometimes useful for developer options that user should not play with.
• repeat: bool Indicate that this option can be repeated. Not applicable for COUNTER and STRINGMAP types. This will turn the option value into an array that you can iterate over. So --day Monday --day Thursday can be used like {{range options.day}}Day: {{.}}{{end}}
• enum: string list Used with the type: ENUM property, it is a list of strings values that represent the set of possible values the option accepts.

These are possible keys under the command args property:

• name: string [required] Name of the option, so name: ISSUE will show in the usage as jira <command> ISSUE. This also represents the name of the argument to be used in the script template, so {{args.ISSUE}}.
• help: string The help message displayed in usage for the argument.
• type: string: The type of the argument, can be one of these values: BOOL, COUNTER, ENUM, FLOAT32, FLOAT64, INT8, INT16, INT32, INT64, INT, STRING, STRINGMAP, UINT8, UINT16, UINT32, UINT64 and UINT. Most of these are primitive data types an should be self-explanatory. The default type is STRING. There are some special types:
  • COUNTER will be an integer type that increments each the argument is provided So something like jira <command> ISSUE-12 ISSUE-23 will results in {{args.ISSUE}} of 2.
  • ENUM type is used with the enum property. The raw type is a string and must be one of the values listed in the enum property.
  • STRINGMAP is a string => string map with the format of KEY=VALUE. So jira <command> foo=bar bin=baz along with a name: OVERRIDE property will allow for {{args.OVERRIDE.foo}} to be bar and {{args.OVERRIDE.bin}} to be baz.
• required: bool Indicate that this argument must be provided on the command line. Conflicts with the default property.
• default: any Specify the default value for the argument. Conflicts with the required property.
• repeat: bool Indicate that this argument can be repeated. Not applicable for COUNTER and STRINGMAP types. This will turn the template value into an array that you can iterate over. So jira <command> ISSUE-12 ISSUE-23 can be used like {{range args.ISSUE}}Issue: {{.}}{{end}}
• enum: string list Used with the type: ENUM property, it is a list of strings values that represent the set of possible values for the argument.

The script property is a template that would produce /bin/sh compatible syntax after the template has been processed. There are 2 key template functions {{args}} and {{options}} that return the parsed arguments and option flags as a map.

To demonstrate how you might use args and options here is a custom-test command:

custom-commands:
  - name: custom-test
    help: Testing the custom commands
    options:
      - name: abc
        short: a
        default: default
      - name: day
        type: ENUM
        enum:
          - Monday
          - Tuesday
          - Wednesday
          - Thursday
          - Friday
        required: true
    args:
      - name: ARG
        required: true
      - name: MORE
        repeat: true
    script: |
      echo COMMAND {{args.ARG}} --abc {{options.abc}} --day {{options.day}} {{range $more := args.MORE}}{{$more}} {{end}}

Then to run it:

$ jira custom-test
ERROR Invalid Usage: required flag --day not provided

$ jira custom-test --day Sunday
ERROR Invalid Usage: enum value must be one of Monday,Tuesday,Wednesday,Thursday,Friday, got 'Sunday'

$ jira custom-test --day Tuesday
ERROR Invalid Usage: required argument 'ARG' not provided

$ jira custom-test --day Tuesday arg1
COMMAND arg1 --abc default --day Tuesday

$ jira custom-test --day Tuesday arg1 more1 more2 more3
COMMAND arg1 --abc default --day Tuesday more1 more2 more3

$ jira custom-test --day Tuesday arg1 more1 more2 more3 --abc non-default
COMMAND arg1 --abc non-default --day Tuesday more1 more2 more3

$ jira custom-test --day Tuesday arg1 more1 more2 more3 -a short-non-default
COMMAND arg1 --abc short-non-default --day Tuesday more1 more2 more3

The script has access to all the environment variables that are in your current environment plus those that jira will set. jira sets environment variables for each config property it has parsed from .jira.d/config.yml or the command configs at .jira.d/<command>.yml. It might be useful to see all environment variables that jira is producing, so here is a simple custom command to list them:

custom-commands:
  - name: env
    help: print the JIRA environment variables available to custom commands
    script: |
      env | grep JIRA

You could use the environment variables automatically, so if your .jira.d/config.yml looks something like this:

project: PROJECT
custom-commands:
  - name: print-project
    help: print the name of the configured project
    script: "echo $JIRA_PROJECT"

• jira mine for listing issues assigned to you

custom-commands:
  - name: mine
    help: display issues assigned to me
    script: |-
      if [ -n "$JIRA_PROJECT" ]; then
          # if `project: ...` configured just list the issues for current project
          {{jira}} list --template table --query "resolution = unresolved and assignee=currentuser() and project = $JIRA_PROJECT ORDER BY priority asc, created"
      else
          # otherwise list issues for all project
          {{jira}} list --template table --query "resolution = unresolved and assignee=currentuser() ORDER BY priority asc, created"
      fi

• jira sprint for listing issues in your current sprint

custom-commands:
  - name: sprint
    help: display issues for active sprint
    script: |-
      if [ -n "$JIRA_PROJECT" ]; then
          # if `project: ...` configured just list the issues for current project
          {{jira}} list --template table --query "sprint in openSprints() and type != epic and resolution = unresolved and project=$JIRA_PROJECT ORDER BY rank asc, created"
      else
          # otherwise list issues for all project
          {{jira}} list --template table --query "sprint in openSprints() and type != epic and resolution = unresolved ORDER BY rank asc, created"
      fi

When you run command like jira edit it will open up your favorite editor with the templatized output so you can quickly edit. When the editor closes go-jira will submit the completed form. The order which go-jira attempts to determine your preferred editor is:

• editor property in any config.yml file
• JIRA_EDITOR environment variable
• EDITOR environment variable
• vim

go-jira has the ability to customize most output (and editor input) via templates. There are default templates available for all operations, which may or may not work for your actual jira implementation. Jira is endlessly customizable, so it is hard to provide default templates that will work for all issue types.

When running a command like jira edit it will look through the current directory hierarchy trying to find a file that matches .jira.d/templates/edit, if found it will use that file as the template, otherwise it will use the default edit template hard-coded into go-jira. You can export the default hard-coded templates with jira export-templates which will write them to ~/.jira.d/templates/.

First the basic templating functionality is defined by the Go language 'text/template' library. The library reference documentation can be found here, and there is a good primer document here. go-jira also provides a few extra helper functions to make it a bit easier to format the data, those functions are defined here.

Knowing what data and fields are available to any given template is not obvious. The easiest approach to determine what is available is to use the debug template on any given operation. For example to find out what is available to the "view" templates, you can use:

jira view GOJIRA-321 -t debug

This will print out the data in JSON format that is available to the template. You can do this for any other operation, like "list":

jira list -t debug

For Atlassian Cloud hosted Jira API Tokens are now required. You will automatically be prompted for an API Token if your jira endpoint ends in .atlassian.net.

1. Edit your config or execute the snippit (make sure to replace <SUBDOMAIN> and <EMAIL>)

export SUBDOMAIN="https://<SUBDOMAIN>.atlassian.net"
export EMAIL="<EMAIL>"
mkdir -p ~/.jira.d
printf "endpoint: $SUBDOMAIN\nuser: $EMAIL\npassword-source: keyring" > ~/.jira.d/config.yml

2. Create a new API Token at id.atlassian.com
3. Execute jira session and enter your API Token. jira will add your session to the keyring.

If you are using a private Jira service, you can force jira to use an api-token by setting the authentication-method: api-token property in your $HOME/.jira.d/config.yml file. The API Token needs to be presented to the Jira service on every request, so it is recommended to store this API Token security within your OS's keyring, or using the pass/gopass service as documented below so that it can be programmatically accessed via jira and not prompt you every time. For a less-secure option you can also provide the API token via a JIRA_API_TOKEN environment variable. If you are unable to use an api-token for an Atlassian Cloud hosted Jira then you can still force jira to use the old session based authentication (until it the hosted system stops accepting it) by setting authentication-method: session.

The API Token authentication requires both the token and the email of the user. The email mut be set in the user: in your config.yml. Failure to provide the user will result in a 401 error.

If your Jira service still allows you to use the Session based authentication method then jira will prompt for a password automatically when get a response header from the Jira service that indicates you do not have an active session (ie the X-Ausername header is set to anonymous). Then after authentication we cache the cloud.session.token cookie returned by the service session login api and reuse that on subsequent requests. Typically this cookie will be valid for several hours (depending on the service configuration). To automatically securely store your password for easy reuse by jira You can enable a password-source via .jira.d/config.yml with possible values of keyring, pass or gopass.

The Jira service has sometimes differing opinions about how a user is identified. In other words the ID you login with might not be ID that the jira system recognized you as. This matters when trying to identify a user via various Jira REST APIs (like issue assignment). This is especially relevant when trying to authenticate with an API Token where the authentication user is usually an email address, but within the Jira system the user is identified by a user name. To accommodate this jira now supports two different properties in the config file. So when authentication using the API Tokens you will likely want something like this in your $HOME/.jira.d/config.yml file:

user: person
login: person@example.com

You can also override these values on the command line with jira --user person --login person@example.com. The login value will be used only for authentication purposes, the user value will be used when a user name is required for any Jira service API calls.

On OSX and Linux there are a few keyring providers that go-jira can use (via this golang module). To integrate go-jira with a supported keyring just add this configuration to $HOME/.jira.d/config.yml:

password-source: keyring

After setting this and issuing a jira login, your credentials will be stored in your platform's backend (e.g. Keychain for Mac OS X) automatically. Subsequent operations, like a jira ls, should automatically login.

An alternative to the keyring password source is the pass tool (documentation here). This uses gpg to encrypt/decrypt passwords on demand and by using gpg-agent you can cache the gpg credentials for a period of time so you will not be prompted repeatedly for decrypting the passwords. The advantage over the keyring integration is that pass can be used on more platforms than OSX and Linux, although it does require more setup. To use pass for password storage and retrieval via go-jira just add this configuration to $HOME/.jira.d/config.yml:

password-source: pass
password-name: jira.example.com/myuser

This assumes you have already setup pass correctly on your system. Specifically you will need to have created a gpg key like this:

$ gpg --gen-key

Then you will need the GPG Key ID you want associated with pass. First list the available keys:

$ gpg --list-keys
/home/gojira/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
-------------------------------------------------
pub   2048R/A307D709 2016-12-18
uid                  Go Jira <gojira@example.com>
sub   2048R/F9A047B8 2016-12-18

Then initialize the pass tool to use the correct key:

$ pass init "Go Jira <gojira@example.com>"

Now insert your password with the name you configured.

$ pass insert jira.example.com/myuser

You probably want to setup gpg-agent so that you don't have to type in your gpg passphrase all the time. You can get gpg-agent to automatically start by adding something like this to your $HOME/.bashrc

if [ -f $HOME/.gpg-agent-info ]; then
    . $HOME/.gpg-agent-info
    export GPG_AGENT_INFO
fi

if [ ! -f $HOME/.gpg-agent.conf ]; then
  cat <<EOM >$HOME/.gpg-agent.conf
default-cache-ttl 604800
max-cache-ttl 604800
default-cache-ttl-ssh 604800
max-cache-ttl-ssh 604800
EOM
fi

if [ -n "${GPG_AGENT_INFO}" ]; then
    nc  -U "${GPG_AGENT_INFO%%:*}" >/dev/null </dev/null
    if [ ! -S "${GPG_AGENT_INFO%%:*}" -o $? != 0 ]; then
        # set passphrase cache so I only have to type my passphrase once a day
        eval $(gpg-agent --options $HOME/.gpg-agent.conf --daemon --write-env-file $HOME/.gpg-agent-info --use-standard-socket --log-file $HOME/tmp/gpg-agent.log --verbose)
    fi
fi
export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

There is also the possibility to use gopass as a password source. gopass (like pass) uses gpg to encrypt/decrypt passwords. To use gopass for password storagte and retrieval via go-jira just add this configuration to $HOME/.jira.d/config.yml:

password-source: gopass
password-name: jira.example.com/myuser

For this to work, you need a working gopass installation.

To configure your gpg-agent to cache your gpg passphrase take a look at the pass section of the readme.

When password-source is set to stdin, the jira login command will read from stdin until EOF, and the bytes read will be the used as the password. This is useful if you have some other programmatic method for fetching passwords. For example, if password-generator creates a one-time password and prints it to stdout, you could use it like this.

$ ./password-generator | jira login --endpoint=https://my.jira.endpoint.com --user=USERNAME

For gopass and pass it is possible to specify the full path for the password-source tool used for retrieval of the password. This can be accomplised by setting the password-source-path option in the configuration file.

E.g.

password-source: gopass
password-name: jira.example.com/myuser
password-source-path: /path/to/my-special-gopass

This will cause go-jira to use the gopass style cli interaction with the my-special-gopass binary.

If you ommit the password-source-path option, either gopass (for gopass) or pass (for pass) will be used.