Jira Command Line Interface (CLI) by Appfire

Being the lead engineer on starship Jira is a challenging position. Resources are scarce on the outskirts of the Atlassian galaxy and managing countless sub-engineers while dealing with laborious tasks is a constant struggle.

However, you refuse to let anything hold you back. You are determined to find a solution, and that solution is automation. Relying on manual processes is unfeasible. You are just one person, and it is impossible to oversee your duties without errors. By implementing automation, you could streamline tedious tasks and minimize mistakes. With this in mind, you set out to revolutionize starship Jira’s operations, confident in your ability to succeed. Managing several Jira instances with hundreds of users and projects can be daunting. Save hours of manual work by automating routine tasks and perform migrations confidently by conducting thorough tests before the migration day.

Peter Macdonald is a Jira Systems Administrator at a government agency. He and his team are responsible for several critical operations, including overseeing the day to-day maintenance and management of several large Jira instances with hundreds of users and projects. As a busy admin within a large organization, Peter knew he needed to automate tedious, repetitive tasks to save time and scale the agency‘s critical processes.

Automating user management One of those repetitive tasks was a complex user authorization process that Peter‘s team had to complete manually each time a team member needed access to Jira.

To automate this, Peter created user groups with specific permissions and, leveraging Jira CLI and Run CLI Actions in Jira, he built automations that now automatically assign new users to appropriate groups. This approach took a repetitive task off the team‘s plate, freeing up bandwidth for higher-impact projects.

Merging Jira instances Peter also leaned on Jira CLI when his agency needed to merge two Jira instances (B and C) and their 270+ projects into another existing Jira instance (A). Manually merging the instances would take a long time and could lead to costly errors.

Peter looked into other solutions to automate this migration but ultimately chose Jira CLI since he appreciated the app‘s ease of use. Instead of taking days to build out project configurations manually, with Jira CLI Peter created empty project configurations in the destination instance A within 1-2 hours, effectively preparing the instance to receive the data from instances B and C.

Starting with instance B migration, Jira CLI allowed Peter to rerun the build of the shell every day, progressively getting to the point where he could start the data import. This process allowed him to thoroughly test the 130 projects that would be migrated from instance B to destination instance A.

Once Peter was happy with the build‘s state, he applied it to instance A and imported instance B‘s project data. He repeated the process to merge instance C into instance A, completing the migration successfully.

Saving hours of manual work While this was a complex migration, Jira CLI assured Peter during the whole migration process. The ability to rerun the migration many times before committing to the final build guaranteed there were no surprises, and Peter could execute the migration confidently.

„The whole migration was done in my spare time, which means I can relax and deploy things as quickly/slowly as I need. I don’t think I could even estimate the massive amount of time I saved by using Jira CLI. Just the build of a single project shell manually would take days. With Jira CLI, I rebuild my projects every day in just 2 hours.” Peter Macdonald, Jira Systems Administrator