A Two-Way Jira Speedway, the JFrog Artifactory App
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5 min read
The path between two clouds ought to be a speedy two-way street. That’s the DevOps pipeline principle behind the JFrog Artifactory App for Jira, which forges a traceable link between your issues in Jira Cloud and your builds in Artifactory on the JFrog DevOps Platform for cloud.
Bringing Issue Tracking to your DevOps Pipeline
Once the app for Jira has been installed you can:
- View any of your builds in Artifactory, and you can see which Jira issues were fixed, then view them in Jira with a quick click of the mouse.
- View an issue in Jira, and you can see which builds in Artifactory have the fix, and click one to view it in Artifactory, where you can download the artifacts.
The JFrog Artifactory app, now available in Atlassian Marketplace, currently works with JFrog Platform cloud accounts and Atlassian cloud accounts. But the JFrog Artifactory app can make the tools you use every day help you develop and release software at top speed.
Builds to Issues
To see which Jira issues are associated with your builds, you may not need to do anything differently at all. Artifactory’s power is enabled through the DevOps pipeline tools and workflows you already use.
It’s likely that you’re already tagging each of your Git repository source code checkins with the Jira issue key(s) those changes resolve. Not only is it a best practice that disciplined developers follow, many companies enforce it with scripts that reject commits without an issue attached.
Artifactory can collect issue key messages from Git, and log it with your builds. It’s added to all the other build information Artifactory acquires to give you knowledge about your builds, providing a traceable path to component binaries and the conditions for deterministic builds.
The Artifactory dashboard for build information displays each of the referenced Jira issues in the Issues tab, and seamlessly provides a link to each issue key in Jira:
Those using one of JFrog’s many CI server build integrations for Artifactory may already be seeing this benefit. Many, such as JFrog Pipes for Bitbucket Pipelines, enable Artifactory’s collection of information from Git automatically.
So most developers already have their builds in Artifactory linked to Jira issues, and can know every issue that was resolved in any build. Those not using a build integration can collect Git information through the JFrog CLI to enable the feature.
Issues to Builds
Since builds in Artifactory can already link to your Jira issues, wouldn’t it be useful if your Jira issues could in turn link to your builds in Artifactory?
Once you install the JFrog Artifactory App for Jira, you can do just that, and see within your Jira issues which Artifactory builds resolve them.
To start, you can find the app in the Atlassian Marketplace. You can find it by searching for “JFrog”.
When you click to install the app, you will need to enter the information about your Artifactory service so that Jira can connect to its build data.
To configure the JFrog Artifactory App:
- Enter the URL for your Artifactory Cloud service.
- Enter an administrator API Key for your Artifactory Cloud service.
- Click Submit to complete the app installation.
Once the app is installed, there’s nothing more to do.
When you view an issue in Jira, you’ll find a Development item in the right-hand sidebar, which shows how many builds reference the issue.
Click the builds count and a window showing the list of applicable builds appears:
When you click the build name listed in the Build column, the Artifactory dashboard displays the build information for that build. You can perform any of the conventional Artifactory functions from here, such as downloading any of the artifacts of that build.
Look Both Ways
With this new app for Jira, you can find the information you need no matter which direction you’re approaching a problem from.
Of course, you can only gain the feature’s benefit if you’re using a cloud subscription of the JFrog DevOps Platform. If you haven’t experienced Artifactory yet, you can get started for free.
The app isn’t yet enabled for self-hosted or on-prem editions, but we’re working on it!
The Jira app is only the latest way that JFrog can help you gain full visibility into and control over every build you produce.
