Connect Jira to Rig

    Sync issues, projects and users out of Jira Cloud, with every field on every issue rather than a chosen subset. Once it is in the warehouse, a bug stops being a ticket and starts being something you can trace back to the customer who reported it and the revenue sitting behind them.

    Requirements
    A Jira Cloud account with access to the projects you want
    Time required
    5 mins

    Before you start

    • This is the Jira Cloud connector, the one on atlassian.net. Self-hosted Server and Data Center instances authenticate differently.
    • The token inherits the permissions of the account that created it, so it sees the projects that person sees, and no others.

    Create the API token

    1. Open your Account settings from the avatar menu.
    2. Go to Security, then API tokens.
    3. Click Create API token, give it a label, and set an expiry you will remember.
    4. Copy the token. It is shown once.
    5. Note the email address of the account you are signed in as, and the subdomain from your Jira URL. For acme.atlassian.net the site is acme.

    Connect it in Rig

    1. In Rig, open Connections and go to Sources & actions.
    2. Search for Jira and open the card.
    3. Atlassian site: the subdomain, so acme. Pasting the full URL works too.
    4. Atlassian account email: the account the token belongs to.
    5. API token: the token you copied.
    6. Click Test, then Sync.

    What Rig pulls in

    Jira lands in its own jira schema, in three tables.

    • Issues: every issue the account can see, with every field on it. That includes the custom fields your team has added, which is usually where the interesting things live, ordered by when they were last updated.
    • Projects: the projects visible to the account, with their keys and metadata.
    • Users: the account directory.

    Taking every field rather than a fixed list is a deliberate choice. Jira installations diverge quickly, and a connector with a hard-coded field list would miss the custom field that a given team's whole workflow depends on. The cost is that issues is a wide table.

    Good to know

    • The sync covers everything the account can see, across all projects. If that is broader than you want in the warehouse, the cleanest control is the account: mint the token from one whose project access is already scoped the way you want the data scoped.
    • Set an expiry you will actually notice. Atlassian now expires API tokens, and an expired one stops the sync without anything else changing. Best to set up a calendar reminder for the week before the expiry date.
    • Issues merge on their ID, so an issue that moves through states updates in place. The warehouse holds current state rather than a transition log.

    Troubleshooting

    • Authentication fails with a token you just made: the email is wrong or missing. Jira uses it as the username, so the token on its own authenticates as nobody. It has to be the address of the account that created the token, not a team alias.
    • The site cannot be found: the site name itself is wrong, or it belongs to a different Atlassian product. Formatting is not the problem, so do not spend time on it: the field strips the scheme, any path and any port before taking the first label, which means acme, acme.atlassian.net and a full URL copied out of your browser all resolve to the same site.
    • A project is missing: the account cannot see it. Jira permissions are per project, so grant that account browse access and it appears on the next sync.
    • The sync stopped working and nothing changed: the token expired. Mint a new one and update the connection.

    What people use this for

    • Measure lead time from creation to resolution
    • Monitor backlog health and aging issues
    • Analyse bug trends and contributor workload

    More ideas for using Jira

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