Make Jira issues searchable via intranet search engine

[c]

We utilize regain as intranet search engine and now want to be able to find Jira issues there, too.

So somehow we need to index them, but Jira (like the search engine) requires login via username and password.

So my questions:

1. Is it possible to auto-login a HTTP client that accesses Jira from a certain IP?
2. What other alternatives do we have letting the search engine indexing the data without allowing anonymous access to the issues?

I already found out that you can login by URL parameters, but that would require us to append the parameters to every request the search engine does, which is nontrivial.

[c · Accepted solution]

I wrote a small PHP script that fetches all projects, then fetches the issues in each project and saves the issue's print view locally.

Around that I build index pages for each project (listing all issues) and a list of all project index pages.

This can now be indexed by the regain without problems.

Before doing all that, I created a jira user group "Search", put the searchengine in there and then allowed this group to access all projects.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You could scrape stuff via curl, or subscribe to an RSS feed if you want to index externally (i.e. you have a script on the Regain server that picks up an RSS feed for a filter like "updated in the last hour", pulls out the text of the fields and indexes those - this has the advantage that you're not scraping html as well, and you can index just the actual data).

However you do it though, Jira respects security, so you must give the crawler mechanism access somehow (and bear in mind that if the crawler has more access than users, you've got a security hole)