GitHub pull request to edit issue for automation

[Taylor Chappell]

Hello all, I'm trying to automate a process in Jira based on actions in GitHub. When a PR is approved in GitHub, I want that to automatically approve the associated Jira issue. The issue is designated by the "[ABC-123]" tag in the title of the pull request.

The connection is established and the development panel shows up with pull requests, commits, and branches. But I can't seem to query the development panel and I'm not versed enough in creating a GitHub action.

[Javier Pozuelo -Exalate- · Accepted solution]

Hi! I'm the community manager at Exalate.

It looks like you’ve already found a solution—great to see! That’s a solid approach—parsing the summaryBean structure directly gives you access to detailed PR data. One limitation, as you noted, is that scripted fields don’t trigger issue update events on value changes, which makes it tricky to hook into workflows. Just in case, there are several tools that can help you achieve this setup.

You can explore available options here: Atlassian Marketplace 

For example, with Exalate, you can detect the pull request approval on the GitHub side and map that to a status change in Jira. This gives you full control over how and when the data syncs between platforms.

[Taylor Chappell · Accepted solution]

To access information in the 'Development' panel on a Jira issue linked to GitHub, you can use ScriptRunner. Here's how I figured this out:

1. Use a scripted field with "def devField = issue.getCustomFieldValue('Development')"
2. This returns a decent block of code. Using an IDE with beautify makes it's pretty easy to split out and read it's components
3. return devField.summaryBean.summary.pullrequest.overall.state or whatever components you're looking for (it can be quite far down the tree)

I haven't quite figured out how to run a workflow off of it yet though. The value changing for the scripted field doesn't push an update issue event.