Best way to authenticate to Jira Rest API from desktop app ?

[Jérémie Campari]

Hi !

Context

I'm developing a small desktop app to display Jira issues and change their status. I would like to share it with friends and allow us to authenticate with their accounts (on jira cloud for now). I don't to find the best way to do it.

And I don't think it's important but I use Electron, in Javascript to make the app.

My understanding of the solutions

• The basic authentication works well but I prefer to don't manage and store the Jira username and password directly.
• On the other side, the oauth 1.0 require that user of the application declare an "application link" in Jira and copy paste, some keys... It's not easy to use.
• If I well understand, I can't use Jira oauth 2 from a desktop app because it's limited to Atlassian connect ?

Main question

So, what is the best way to connect from desktop app to Jira Cloud ?

Sorry if my english is not good, I'm french :)

Thanks !

Bye.

[Claudiu Lionte · Accepted solution]

Hi Jérémie,

If Oauth is too complicated, please see the documentation for API Tokens. You can generate one or more and revoke them anytime with your password remaining the same.

Claudiu

[Paudi Moriarty]

From my own attempts at this, the issue I see with the JIRA OAuth 1.0 implementation is the response to the `.../oauth/authorize` request to approve access doesn't make it easy to extract the verification code for programmatic use. Since my app is a desktop app I can't use the OAuth callback. I can screen scrape the response but that's not a great solution. 

EDIT: I just realised I can intercept the redirect to the callback URL and get the oauth_verifier for the access-token request.