JIRA has a collection of REST APIs that can be used for doing some tasks programmatically. I haven’t been using them for long but I’ve found three that are particularly useful.

I’m referencing to the 6.2.4 API doc which is found here. I used Python with Requests and the built-in JSON module to help parse through the responses.

reindex

If you want to re-index on a schedule, you can simply call this API and background indexing will start.

http://<jira_instance_url>/rest/api/2/reindex

If you get 200 or 202 back, then it means that indexing has been successfully started. If you 409 back, that means indexing has already started. The returned JSON will contain the % complete and the type of indexing.

project

If you want a list of all projects in your JIRA instance, you can call this API and you’ll get back a JSON list of them. You get several pieces of useful information back including the project URL, the key, and the friendly name.

http://<jira_instance_url>/rest/api/2/project

components

If you want to see a list of all the components for a particular project, you use the components API to fetch those.

http://<jira_instance_url>/rest/api/2/project/<project_key>/components

This may seem silly, but there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to produce a project chart from JIRA that would show this data. I recently used APIs to produce a Python script that dumps out each project and list of it’s components. For people who want to review this sort of thing, it makes their lives a lot easier. Below is an example of what it looks like, per project.

Project: My Cool Project
Key: MCP

UI/UX
Login
Core Functionality
Database
Security
APIs
======================================================

My only complaint with their APIs currently is that I cannot add versions via API and (as of 6.2.4) adding versions to multiple projects is tedious and error-prone because it’s so manual.