How to use REST APIs to create and manage JIRA cloud tickets

JIRA is an awesome solution for a wide variety of use cases including Project Management and ticket creation for issues. It enables complete timeline tracking, helps categorization of different varieties of tasks and allows designing of custom flow for any issue type. Sometimes, you have use cases where you want to integrate your application with JIRA and want to be able to create tickets, modify them or just track statistics of your JIRA tickets.

I have a similar use case recently I want to create tickets whenever an issue is Acknowledged in our URL Monitoring system. My application is written in Python 2.7 and while there is a library present in it for handling JIRA tickets, it seemed to have some issue with the latest updates that might have happened on the cloud JIRA that I am using. And even in the case if the library was working at this point in time, Python 2.7 support is stopping in December 2020 and hence it becomes important for me to go for a solution that doesn't stop working due to an incompatibility issue of the library. Hence, the best solution is to go for using REST APIs for my interaction with JIRA from my web app. That way I am safe even if when we shift to Python 3 for our application.

I am assuming you already have an account on JIRA and have a project created where you plan to create JIRA tickets through REST API. The first thing we need to do is to create an authentication token for your user which will be used when you call JIRA REST APIs for ticket creations. To do so:

1. Go to your Account Settings page on JIRA.
2. From the left sidebar, select the option "Security" and click on "Create and manage API tokens" link under the API Token section.

3. Click on the Create API token button
4. Enter a label to uniquely identify the where you are going to use the token or as per your wish.

5. A token will be generated which you can copy to your clipboard directly without displaying it on the screen. You must copy and save the token carefully because you won't be able to access it again. In case you lose it later on, you must create a new token.

Create a JIRA ticket using REST API

import requests
body = {
    "fields": {
        "project":
            {
                "key": "UM"
            },
        "summary": "Test 1",
        "description": "Creating of an issue using project keys and issue type names using the REST API",
        "issuetype": {
            "name": "Bug"
        },"priority": {
            "id": "2"
        }
    }
}
url = 'https://techulator.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/'
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
r = requests.post(url, auth=('ankit@techulator.com', ''), headers=headers, data=json.dumps(body))
key = r.json()
print(key)

{u'self': u'https://techulator.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/10000', u'id': u'10000', u'key': u'UM-1'}

Assign the JIRA ticket to a user using REST

import requests
key= 'UM-1'
url = 'https://techulator.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/issue/{}/assignee'.format(key)
body = {
    "name": "5dff8218eb2ae70ea1de4f34"
}
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
r = requests.put(url, auth=('ankit@techulator.com', ''), headers=headers, data=json.dumps(body))

Change status of JIRA ticket through REST API

import requests
key= 'UM-1'
url = 'https://techulator.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/{}/transitions?expand=transitions.fields'.format(key)
r = requests.get(url, auth=('ankit@techulator.com', ''), headers=headers, data=json.dumps(body))

import requests
key= 'UM-1'
url = 'https://techulator.atlassian.net/rest/api/2/issue/{}/transitions?expand=transitions.fields'.format(key)
print url
body = {"transition":
            {
                "id": "21"
            }
        }
headers = {"Content-Type": "application/json"}
r = requests.post(url, auth=('ankit@techulator.com', ''), headers=headers, data=json.dumps(body))