Getting Jira to work within Eclipse

As by my post of yesterday that I am now using pulse and my eclipse setup simply works I finally came around to see and act upon our feature and bug tracker within eclipse. We are using the great Jira from Atlassian for our open source projects Razuna and Kabunto and I read somewhere that they have a Eclipse plugin available.

As I found out soon is that the dedicated Eclipse Jira plugin is not working well (I guess they even stopped development), but that the Mylyn project works perfectly with Jira. Mylyn is a task-focused interface for Eclipse and can be used to track all your issues within Jira, Trac and Bugzilla. For Jira all you have to do is to enable a couple of things.

Install Mylyn in Eclipse

If you are using Pulse (why aren’t you?) then open up the Pulse Explorer and add Mylyn to your profile. Just adding Mylyn won’t do it as the related plugins have to be installed as well. Simply click on the “plus” sign and choose the ones you need.

Then just do a “Run” and Mylyn with the related plugins will be installed. Since we are using Pulse your profile has just been updated and this setup is available to you, and if you share it, anywhere.

Setup Jira to allow RPC calls

To make Mylyn work with Jira you will have to allow RPC calls to Jira. If you did a default installation the RPC plugin should already be installed within Jira. Just make sure that it is also enabled!

Enabling the plugin is not enough. You will also explicitly have to enable RPC API calls to Jira by going into the “General Configuration” and enable “Accept remote API calls”.

You can test that RPC calls work when you go to the following URL for your Jira installation:

http://myjiradomain.com/rpc/soap/jirasoapservice-v2?wsdl

If you receive a XML page all should be good to go.

Jira within Eclipse

Now start up Eclipse and choose “Window / Show View / Others”. From the Explorer choose Mylyn and Taks List and/or Task Repositories. From now on it is simply a matter of setting up Jira parameters. Simply add a new repository and connect to Jira.

Once done you will be able to see all your issues within Eclipse, add a new issue, edit existing ones and so on. The cool thing about it, is that the plugin recognizes your saved searches and displays the issues according to your filters!

This all totally integrated into your editing workflow. I love it.

There is also a dedicated page from Atlassian available that walks you trough all installation steps for other Eclipse versions.

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