I’m trying to set up an automated system where a new event is added to Google Calendar whenever an issue is created in JIRA. I want the event’s start and end times to come from custom fields in the JIRA issue.
I’ve looked into JIRA webhooks, but I’m not sure how to make them work with the Google Calendar API. Has anyone done something like this before? Any tips or pointers would be really helpful.
I’m thinking the process should go something like this:
Issue created in JIRA
Webhook triggered
Custom field data extracted
Google Calendar API called to create event
But I’m stuck on the details. How do I set up the webhook? How do I authenticate with Google Calendar? Any advice would be awesome. Thanks!
hey liamj, you might wanna check out ifttt to link jira with google calendar. it’s a quick and messy solution, works by triggering an automation when new issues come up. might be a simpler path without heavy coding.
I’ve actually tackled this exact problem at my company. We ended up using Zapier like sofiag mentioned, but found it had some limitations for our specific needs. So we built a custom solution using Python and deployed it on AWS Lambda.
Here’s the gist of our setup:
We configured JIRA to send a webhook to our Lambda function whenever an issue is created. The function parses the webhook payload, extracts the relevant data, and then uses the Google Calendar API to create the event.
For authentication, we used a service account with domain-wide delegation. This allowed our Lambda function to create events on behalf of users without needing their individual credentials.
The trickiest part was handling rate limits and retries, especially when dealing with a large volume of issues. We implemented exponential backoff and proper error handling to ensure reliability.
If you’re comfortable with Python and AWS, this approach gives you full control and scalability. Happy to share more details if you’re interested in going down this route.
I’ve implemented a similar integration using Zapier, which can be a great middle-ground solution if you’re not looking to code everything from scratch. Here’s how I approached it:
Set up a Zap triggered by new JIRA issues. Configure the Zap to pull the relevant custom field data from JIRA. Use Zapier’s Google Calendar integration to create events based on that data.
The beauty of this approach is that Zapier handles the webhook setup and API authentication for both JIRA and Google Calendar. It’s not as customizable as a fully coded solution, but it’s quick to set up and maintains itself well.
If you need more control, you might want to look into using AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions to handle the webhook and make the Calendar API calls. This would give you more flexibility but requires more setup and maintenance.