Can JIRA track both developer and project repositories in GitHub?

[Anna Waldron]

My organization has linked some project repos to JIRA for my team, so that these repos are visible in JIRA. My team would like to use a forking workflow (https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/forking-workflow) and we have found that when we create branches and commits in our developer repos (which are not linked to JIRA) with an issue number in them, JIRA links to them automatically under the "Development" section of the ticket. This is great, except that when we do a pull request from the dev repo back to the project repo, which is linked to JIRA, the pull request doesn't show up on the issue ticket. Pull requests within the developer repos do however show up. 

My question is, is it possible to have JIRA link to the commits and branches in developer repos AND link to pull requests and commits in the project repos? Or do we have to choose one or the other? (I found it odd that the project repos are the ones that are visible in JIRA but its the dev repo actions that are showing up on the tickets). We are partial to using the forking workflow for tighter control over the project repo. Is there a way we could modify the workflow to better integrate with JIRA? For example opening branches in the project repo and then forking those branches rather than creating branches in the dev repos. 

Thank you.

[Mikael Sandberg]

When you are doing the pull request from your developer repo to the project repo, do you mention any Jira keys in the pull request? The link between Bitbucket and Jira is created by either putting the Jira key in the branch name, in a commit comment or in the pull request. 

[Anna Waldron]

Yes, I put the issue key in the pull request name, and it was also the name of the branch that I was working from, which contained commits with it in their message. Using GitHub, not Bitbucket.

I have found that the branches and commits link to JIRA correctly from the project repo if I am working on it only there, without going into any dev repos first. It is when the dev repo links to JIRA first that the project repo then doesn't link afterwards.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Are the commit hashes the same in both the dev repo and project repo in the cases were the dev repo first links to Jira? 

[Anna Waldron]

I don't think so. Pull requests from the dev repo to the project repo don't show up either before or after merging. In fact I have discovered that pull requests to the project repo aren't showing up no matter where they are made from. Though I am putting the issue key in the pull request name, comment, and branch name.