Python Access For JIRA Part II

I’m going to share with you how to build a class that communicates with JIRA in a very easy way, and you’ll be able to learn about web scraping during the process:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
# Description: JIRA web interface methods
# Authors: sophilabs
# Copyright: Copyright (c) 2011, sophilabs.

import httplib
import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def singleton(cls):
    instances = {}
    def instance():
        if cls not in instances:
            instances[cls] = cls()
        return instances[cls]
    return instance

@singleton
class JiraHTTPConnection:

    def init(self, domain, username, password):
        print domain
        self.__cookie = None
        self.__headers = None
        self.__connection = httplib.HTTPConnection(domain)
        response = self.get("/")
        data = response.read()
        self.__headers = response.getheaders()
        self.__cookie = [x[1] for x in self.__headers if x[0] == "set-cookie"][0]
        self.__login(username, password)

    def get(self, path, headers=None):
        if headers is None:
            headers = {"Cookie": self.__cookie}
        self.__connection.request("GET", path, "", headers)
        return self.__connection.getresponse()

    def post(self, path, post_data, headers=None):
        if not headers:
            headers = {"Cookie": self.__cookie}
        self.__connection.request("POST", path, post_data, headers)
        return self.__connection.getresponse()

    #private

    def __login(self, username, password):
        post_data = "os_username=%s&os_password=%s&os_destination=" % (username, password) + "%2Fsecure%2F"
        headers = { "Cookie" : self.__cookie, "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "Content-Length": str(len(post_data)) }
        path = '/login.jsp'
        response = self.post(path, post_data, headers)
        data = response.read()

class JiraWebConnection:

    def __init__(self, domain, username, password):
        JiraHTTPConnection().init(domain, username, password)

    def projects(self):
        path = "/secure/BrowseProject.jspa"
        response = JiraHTTPConnection().get(path)
        data = response.read()
        soup = BeautifulSoup(data)
        project_keys = [re.search("/browse/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)", unicode(x).encode("utf-8")).group(1) for x in soup("a") if "/browse/" in unicode(x).encode("utf-8")]
        return project_keys

We want the JiraHTTPConnection class to be a singleton. This can be achieved using decorators . This class will be responsible for providing requests methods and taking care of cookies, and logging in to JIRA when connection is first established.

I’ve used Live HTTP Headers for Firefox to inspect the contents of the POST request during a normal login to JIRA. Then all we need is to replicate that request by creating a custom one.

def __login(self, username, password):
        post_data = "os_username=%s&os_password=%s&os_destination=" % (username, password) + "%2Fsecure%2F"
        headers = { "Cookie" : self.__cookie, "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", "Content-Length": str(len(post_data)) }
        path = '/login.jsp'
        response = self.post(path, post_data, headers)
        data = response.read()

So you’ll have the data containing the proper credentials and we need to add the cookie to the header as well.
Don’t forget to read the response after the request even if you’re making no use of it.

You can add this piece of code to the bottom of the file for testing:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    jira = JiraWebConnection(YOUR_JIRA_URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD)
    p = jira.projects()

This will return a list of project keys associated to the current user.

Coming Up: many more JIRA interfacing methods.

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