Hacking JIRA with Ruby

March 19, 2009 at 10:13 pm | Posted in Programming | 8 Comments

I have been reading a lot over the last couple of months. Great books like “The World is Flat 3.0”, “Dreaming in Code”, “My Job went to India”, “The five dysfunctions of a team”, “Clean Code” and quite a few more. However I started to realize that although reading is fun, it tends to keep me in my comfort zone. I should really practice writing. People remember great writers. You hardly ever hear people saying “he was such a great reader” about a person that died hundred years ago.

So I just put down here what I’m doing at the moment. Lately I started to automate some things like writing progress reports for customers. Now please don’t stop reading at the word “progress report”. It might become a bit more interesting than you would expect. Part of my progress report consists of all kinds of metrics about a project: budgets, quality, schedule, etc. These metrics are collected from several systems and JIRA is one of them. Until recently I copied and pasted all this data into OpenOffice, did some magical calculations with a spreadsheet, and finally generated a few graphs which I used in the progress reports. So far the boring part.

However, JIRA also has a very nice RPC plugin which can be used to invoke JIRA operations remotely. And that’s exactly what I’m playing with at the moment. I’m using jira4r as a Ruby client library to automate all my tedious copy and paste actions. First experiments are succesful: with just a couple of lines (3 lines of code to be exact) of Ruby code I’m able to get a listing of all projects registered in a certain JIRA instance. Next step is to find a good library to generate graphs. Oh, and some actual code:

require 'rubygems'
require 'jira4r/jira_tool'

# Replace next url, username and password according to your own JIRA setup
jira = Jira4R::JiraTool.new(2, "http://jira.atlassian.com")
jira.login("soaptester", "soaptester")

# Dump all project descriptions
jira.getProjects.each { |project| puts project.description}