Forge-ing Simple Solutions for Jira: Project Custom Field

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Good day, community! Ian here from Atlassian’s Developer Experience team.

As Jira users and administrators, we continuously look for ways to enhance our day-to-day Jira experience. We want to improve collaboration, streamline workflows, and integrate SaaS tools which sometimes require building customized solutions bespoke to our organization’s needs - this is where Forge comes into the picture.

What is Forge anyway?

Forge is a serverless app development platform that is already built into Jira Cloud and a range of other Atlassian cloud products, free of charge.

You may think of Forge as the platform used by professional Marketplace developers to build commercial apps, but did you know that Forge originally started as a project to help in-house developers (i.e., users and Jira administrators) customize their own cloud product sites? Forge focuses on simplifying app development by automatically handling most aspects of web application development — including hosting, scaling, authentication, and security — so that you can focus on solving the business needs of your team.

While you can create complex apps and beautiful user experiences on Forge, it can also be used to build simple, everyday custom solutions with just a few lines of javascript.

What type of solutions can I build?

The platform supports various use cases, including those related to the UI as well as background processes, that can cater to the specific needs of your team or organization. It can assist you in creating new custom fields or managing product events that can trigger specific automation, among other things.

There is a list of feature suggestions for Jira Cloud and I found one with close to 700 upvotes regarding custom fields for projects (see here for more information). In Jira, issue fields already exist, for this feature suggestion, it is a custom field that is associated with a project. If you need to track project-specific information like team size, which team channel to reach out to for support, or the owner of the project, project fields can help you out.

 

This app took less than an hour to write and is only a handful of lines of JavaScript.

If you’re interested in creating custom fields for your own projects, or simply keen on exploring the code, you can check out this step-by-step guide which includes the link to the repository.

Have you built anything with Forge for yourself or your team? Let us know in the comments!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this @Ian Ragudo  - we currently have a custom connect app that is hosting on our end on our in house built system based off a PHP framework. We currently created over 30 fields as per https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/modules/issue-field/ 

You mentioned Javascript in this article. Is Forge specific to JS / React? And is it only handled through the CLI commands? 

Lastly, you state it is free of charge, with Jira Software Standard and JSM Premium, I am assuming we can move to a forge app and still keep our integral custom internal app interactions, API calls, etc all in tact?

Please let me know. Would be great if we could have a call / demo for this.

[Ian Ragudo]

I'm glad you liked it, @Yatish Madhav. 

You mentioned Javascript in this article. Is Forge specific to JS / React?

Yes, it is currently JS-specific as the current Forge runtime uses a custom JavaScript environment.

And is it only handled through the CLI commands?

Building the template, deploying, and installing the app to different environments are handled via CLI commands. You can check this getting started guide for more information

I am assuming we can move to a forge app and still keep our integral custom internal app interactions, API calls, etc all in tact?

If your internal app's current capabilities and API calls are supported by Forge, then moving to a Forge app is possible.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Ian Ragudo -  i would like to try this out but will be a bit of a learning curve. Would this in its entirety be free of charge? what does that entail? I.e does the app hosting, updating the connect app descriptor, etc all included? Also where do the CLI commands run from - is there a web portal that connects to a bash/terminal or can I run it from my Ubuntu laptop? 

[Ian Ragudo]

Happy to help, @Yatish Madhav.

Would this in its entirety be free of charge? what does that entail? 

Yes, usage of the platform and hosting of your own Forge apps are free. 

updating the connect app descriptor,etc all included?

If you mean updating your Connect apps' descriptor file and converting it to Forge manifest, then this has to be done by the app owner manually.

is there a web portal that connects to a bash/terminal or can I run it from my Ubuntu laptop? 

The Forge CLI is run on the user's command line and has support for Windows, Linux, and Mac. It can be installed by running

npm install -g @forge/cli