Automation and the Atlassian Stack

[Mark_Kobold]

We run a few atlassian products and some others that give our organization a complete software development operations stack. 

We are now looking to automate the creation of project resources that are not just JIRA from within JIRA itself. The best working example of this working is atlassian's own cloud service where someone can sign-up pick the services they want and everything is created across the various systems and linked up. 

A simple use case is we want all software development projects using JIRA and Confluence so when we make one we automatically make the other with similar if not the same project keys and link them up accordingly. Now just add more services like Jenkins, Crucible/Fisheye to the mix and that is the end goal for us.

We have the same needs; however we are running behind the firewall. So in essence if a member of our organization needs to start a new software development project we would like to provide a similar experience of clicking a few boxes and then having confluence, crucible/fisheye, jenkins, etc all set up automatically. 

I am looking for best practices and or existing solutions that might already solve this problem. Otherwise it seems like writing our own plug-ins is the only way to achieve this goal.

[Midori]

I don't think there are any ready-made tool for this, that would support the full Atlassian product portfolio plus Jenkis, and runs behind the firewall.

But, all those products have a REST API! 

If I were you, I'd write a script that connect to the REST APIs, create the JIRA project, the Confluence project, etc. I'd write it in the language in which I'm the most productive with. It'd much faster than creating a full-blown JIRA plugin, and the future maintenance costs are minimal, as the REST APIs are stable (not changing).

[Mark_Kobold]

We have been leaning towards this as a solution. Justification that a solution doesn't already exist helps though. Thinking that Atlassian CLI plugins would work in their latest incarnations. JIRA and Confluence don't see to have a lot of administrative REST API functions. Jenkins and the other systems are functional administratively from a REST API standpoint.

[Midori]

What particular "administrative" functions are you looking for?

[Mark_Kobold]

The REST API is not complete as over the years JIRA/Atlassian have had various incarnations of remote APIs. So right now, we would have to use JSON-RPC in lieu of traditional SOAP/XML as things like creating a project and assigning schemes, roles, access, etc are not in REST but currently in the SOAP/JSON-RPC world. Unless of course i am misreading this page https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/api-reference/jira-api-status/jira-rpc-services/jira-json-rpc-overview

[Bob Swift]

Atlassian is getting closer to providing more administrative APIs via as they replace SOAP APIs. Atlassian CLI (https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/display/ACLI) uses whatever remove service is available to provide good coverage of many automation requests.

[Midori]

As far as I know, SOAP APIs will be completely removed from JIRA 7, which should be out soon. I'm sure that Atlassian only removes those, if their modern REST based replacement will be made available at the same time.

[Bob Swift]

Yes, they are just giving developers access to the final pieces to get to 100% equivalency.

[Alexander Penev [ByteSource]]

Hi Mark,

We are offering such a service to our customers and the technology behind is completely extensible, it could run on GCE, AWS, VCloud , OpenStack etc. If you are interested we could build this for you. If you like to have some hints how to build it yourself, you can ask me some concrete questions. Just take a look on https://bytesourcecloud.com , try int out and tell me if this is something interesting for you

[Daniel Wester]

Mark, we at Wittified are working on something like this. You can reach me at daniel@wittified.com if you want more info.