I need to build automation for managing Jira issues through my application. Specifically, I want to handle creating new tickets, updating assignees, and marking issues as resolved without using the web interface.
During my research, I discovered that Jira offers CLI utilities and also provides SOAP-based web services for integration. There might be other options I haven’t considered yet.
I’m looking for recommendations on which integration method would work best for programmatic ticket management. What are the pros and cons of different approaches? Has anyone implemented similar automation and can share their experience with the available tools and APIs?
REST API is your best bet. I built something similar last year and tried a few approaches before landing on it. Skip the SOAP services - they’re deprecated now. I used REST API v3 with auth tokens and it worked great. The docs are solid and endpoints make sense. You can handle ticket creation, assignee changes, and status updates with basic HTTP requests. I wrapped the common operations in functions to keep things clean. Watch out for rate limiting though, especially with bulk operations. Hit some throttling early on and had to add exponential backoff. Custom fields can be annoying depending on your Jira setup, so test those carefully. CLI tools work for quick scripts but they’re a pain for real integrations. REST API gives you way better error handling and flexibility for production stuff.
honestly, just use the atlassian-python-api library for python. it’ll save you tons of boilerplate code and handles auth/error handling automatically. i’ve used it for similar automation projects and it works way better than raw REST calls. easy to install and the docs cover most of the use cases you mentioned.
I’ve used the Jira Java API (JRJC) in enterprise setups and it’s been rock solid. Main win over REST? Type safety and built-in validation - you catch issues at compile time instead of runtime disasters. Auth setup’s pretty straightforward with OAuth or basic tokens. Performance handled our batch jobs fine, though it’s overkill if you’re just doing simple stuff. Watch out for version mismatches between the client library and your Jira server - learned that one the hard way. Docs aren’t great but it covers everything including custom fields. We’ve run it in production for two years with barely any maintenance headaches. If you need stability over simplicity, it’s solid.