I’m running a self-hosted setup with GitLab Community Edition and Jira. I need to establish a connection between these two tools.
What I’m trying to achieve:
Connect git commits to specific Jira tickets
Update Jira ticket status through git commits (like starting, progressing, or closing tickets)
Restrict these actions to certain branches only - for example, only update ticket status when commits are made to the main branch, since we use pull requests for all feature development and bug fixes
The issue is that only GitLab Enterprise Edition has native Jira integration built in. Is there a way to accomplish this with GitLab Community Edition?
Skip the custom coding headaches. I hit this same GitLab CE limitation at my last job and wasted weeks building webhook handlers from scratch.
Just use automation tools that handle everything for you. They monitor GitLab webhooks, parse commit messages for Jira IDs, check which branch triggered stuff, and update tickets automatically.
You get drag-and-drop workflow builders instead of writing middleware. Branch filtering becomes a simple if/then step. No more maintaining Node.js services or debugging webhook parsing.
The real win is edge case handling. Jira API fails? Auto-retry. Bulk commits? Handled. All the stuff that breaks your custom code later.
I’ve watched teams spend months babysitting integrations that break every GitLab or Jira update. Why build it yourself when you can have something reliable running in minutes?
webhooks r the way to do it! set up a gitlab webhook to trigger on push events n then parse commit msgs for jira ticket IDs. u can use jira’s REST api to update statuses. it’ll need some scripting but it totally works with CE.
Had this exact problem with GitLab CE and fixed it with a custom middleware service. Since CE doesn’t have built-in Jira integration, I wrote a simple Node.js service that sits between GitLab and Jira. It listens for GitLab webhook events, filters them by branch rules, then hits the Jira API. For branch restrictions, just configure it to check the webhook payload’s ref field and only process commits from your target branches. The service grabs Jira ticket patterns from commit messages and uses transition IDs to update ticket status. Takes some setup work upfront, but you get full control over the integration and it works great with older versions.