Atlassian CLI Client
If you happen to use Atlassian products like JIRA, Bamboo, Stash, Confluence, etc., you may be surprised to know that all these products are backed by a handy command line interface, namely Atlassian Command Line Interface.
Imagine opening, modifying and closing JIRA issues from command line. What about starting Bamboo build plans, opening and closing Stash pull requests, updating Wiki pages?
“Why would I do that?” you would ask. Indeed, there’s not much benefit to automate these things for you as a user, unless you are some bash addict. However, stop for a moment and think “Automation” and you’ll see how many things a basic shell script can do. All you need is Java and shell interpreter, which are present on any decent build box.
Atlassian CLI Client is available on Atlassian Marketplace. It is not developed by Atlassian though, which is very important to know if you plan to use it.
This is where the confusion between Atlassian CLI Plugin and Atlassian CLI Client needs to be cleared up.
Plugin is not free and should be purchased for Atlassian products, e.g. there’s CLI plugin for JIRA, Bamboo, Stash. This basically a UI for command line tools.
Client (command line tools) can be freely downloaded and installed. You can find a few outdated Homebrew formulas on GitHub that automate client installation. So you might easily assume that it’s free, but it’s not!
You must purchase a license at least for one of the Atlassian CLI Plugins in order to use the Client.
The purpose of this post is to introduce you to Atlassian CLI Plugin if you don’t know about it yet. The plugin is very well documented and comes with tons of examples.
The thing that I didn’t like about it is installation process. It’s a straightforward “download, move, update PATH” process. There’s nothing bad in the process itself, but when you need to roll out CLI tools on a dozen of build agents, you start looking for a better way.
So I follow up this post with 2 more