How to write a Python script authenticating with Jira via OAuth

If you are writing a script that interacts with Jira through a REST API, you should authenticate using an OAuth token, rather than an embedded username/password. Here we describe one way to do the 'oauth dance' to generate a trusted token using Python 3 - specifically the jirashell utility from the jira Python package. jirashell then forms a useful basis for a Python script. Our example script uses OAuth to call an undocumented REST API for querying license data.

Establishing OAuth trust

Install Python 3

Running python3 or python --version should show Python 3.x.

Create a venv

mkdir jira-oauth
cd jira-oauth
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate

Install Python libraries

pip3 install jira ipython

Generate an RSA public key

openssl genrsa -out rsa.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in rsa.pem -pubout -out rsa.pub

Create an application link

In Jira, create an applink. Applinks normally connect to other HTTP apps, but in this case our OAuth client doesn't have a URL, so use a fake one.

I originally created these instructions when creating an OAuth token for a Nagios Jira license monitor, hence the token I use is monitor-jira-license , and the fake URL is http://monitor-jira-license:

Jira will complain, but just click Continue:

On the next page, enter 'monitor-jira-license' as the Application Name. Leave other fields blank. Check the 'Create incoming link' checkbox:

On the next page, fill in:

Field	Value	Notes
Consumer Key	monitor-jira-license	this key will be used in the script
Consumer Name	Monitor Jira License	any descriptive text
Public key	contents of rsa.pub

Click 'Continue', and your application link will be created.

OAuth dance

Now from your terminal, do the OAuth dance with your Jira installation:

BROWSER='echo %s' jirashell --server https://issues.redradishtech.com --consumer-key monitor-jira-license --key-cert rsa.pem --oauth-dance

Jirashell would normally try to launch your preferred web browser, using the webbrowser library. By setting the BROWSER env variable, we tell Python not to bother, and just print the URL for us to manually cut & paste. This is require for server environments, where lynx isn't able to deal with Jira's Javascript.

This should print a URL. Open it in your browser:

Click *Allow* in the Browser window:

After the URL, your terminal also should have displayed:

Your browser is opening the OAuth authorization for this client session.
Have you authorized this program to connect on your behalf to https://issues.redradishtech.com? (y/n)

Press 'y'.

The jirashell command now proceeds to launch an IPython session:

<JIRA Shell 2.0.0 (https://issues.redradishtech.com)>

*** JIRA shell active; client is in 'jira'. Press Ctrl-D to exit.

In [1]:

Type oauth to print the OAuth object:

Now press ctrl-d to exit.

Test your OAuth token

Now embed the 'consumer_key', 'access_token' and 'access_token_secret' values you saw above into a new jirashell command:

jirashell --server https://issues.redradishtech.com --consumer-key monitor-jira-license --access-token A56FItjuH3jfcCs4aYS57gzXnAPXk2Zt --access-token-secret t8JaIJGSsxqZLRQoDQbQYm9f761zgvPs --key-cert rsa.pem  <<< 'jira.server_info()'

If successful, the jira.server_info() command piped to stdin should succeed:

<JIRA Shell 2.0.0 (https://issues.redradishtech.com)>

*** JIRA shell active; client is in 'jira'. Press Ctrl-D to exit.

In [1]: Out[1]: 
{'baseUrl': 'https://issues.redradishtech.com',
 'version': '7.13.0',
 'versionNumbers': [7, 13, 0],
 'deploymentType': 'Server',
 'buildNumber': 713000,
 'buildDate': '2018-11-28T00:00:00.000+1100',
 'scmInfo': 'fbf406879436de2f3fb1cfa09c7fa556fb79615a',
 'serverTitle': 'Red Radish JIRA'}

In [2]: Do you really want to exit ([y]/n)?

You now have the three things you need for your script: the token, the token secret, and rsa.pub private key.

Using `jirashell` as a base for your script

If your script is Python, you can use jirashell as a library to handle all the ugly command-line parsing. In my case:

$ cp venv/bin/jirashell check-jira-license
$ vim check-jira-license   # Make changes
$ cat check-jira-license
#!/home/jturner/src/redradish/nagios-jira-license/venv/bin/python3

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
import sys

from jira.jirashell import get_config, JIRA

def main():
    options, basic_auth, oauth = get_config()

    jira = JIRA(options=options, oauth=oauth)

    print(jira.server_info())

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())

This command can then be invoked using the same command-line flags as jirashell :

./check-jira-license --server https://issues.redradishtech.com --consumer-key monitor-jira-license --access-token kLYKeT0g9EiJDDmqlxQTH9VjRs2fpFS6 --access-token-secret snhWUlGQmzLu6I9ju1aQGNjulQQPT1lz --key-cert rsa.pem

Some JIRA REST calls are not wrapped in the Python JIRA library. For those, you can use the OAuth credentials with the requests library directly, as follows:

#!/home/jturner/src/redradish/nagios-jira-license/venv/bin/python3

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
import sys

from jira.jirashell import get_config, JIRA
import requests

def getlicensecounts(options, jira):
    url=options['server'] + '/rest/plugins/applications/1.0/installed/jira-software'
    response = requests.get(url,  auth=jira._session.auth)
    responsejson = response.json()
    return (responsejson['accessDetails']['activeUserCount'], responsejson['accessDetails']['licensedUserCount'])

def main():
    options, basic_auth, oauth = get_config()

    jira = JIRA(options=options, oauth=oauth)
    activecount, totalcount = getlicensecounts(options, jira)
    print(f"Using {activecount} of {totalcount} license slots")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())

You can invoke non-REST ( /secure/admin/* ) URLs with OAuth credentials too, but Jira's "websudo" authentication will demand a password, rendering OAuth useless.

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