Import GitHub issues to jira

[Eutelo Pena]

Hi,

My company has GitHub account for repositories and issues management, and now, we are want to migrate to JIRA. 

I have read that Atlassian does not support to GitHub anymore.

Is there any way to import our Github Issues to JIRA and sync these two tools for future?

Thanks

[Riddhi Shah]

Hello @Eutelo Pena

Yes, you can import your Github Issues to JIRA and sync these two tools for future using Exalate.

I'm Riddhi from the Exalate team, which is a live synchronization tool. If you agree to this solution we can help you with live syncing of the multiple projects.

Exalate is made for the use case you described. As it allows syncing information bi- and uni-directionally between Github and Jira instances.

It's mega flexible, you can sync all types of information, including comments, attachments and custom fields. You can control what to sync and what not, and much more ....

By the way, It might also be useful to set up a live video-discussion to demonstrate how Exalate would get set up for your use case

Would that be valuable to you? You can book a suitable slot here.

Cheers,

Riddhi

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Eutelo,

I see that you are looking to import Github project data into Jira. 

This can still be done, but depending on your platform for Jira the steps to do so are quite different.

If you were using Jira Server:

Then you could utilize the importer plugin in Jira to use the wizard that specifically caters to importing this data from Github.  More details about this are in Importing data from Github.  Note that this method is planned to be deprecated in Jira 8.4 and higher.   The current Jira version is 8.2.2 today, so it could be some time before that new version ships, but something to keep in mind.

For Jira Cloud sites:

That importers plugin does not exist for Jira Cloud sites today.  As such you would need to first export that data from github in either CSV or JSON format that Jira Cloud then could use to import your data.  

But please note that neither platform's solution for this is designed to sync the data between github and Jira in an on-going fashion. This is designed to be a one time data migration path.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Andriy Kozynets]

Hi @Andy Heinzer 

I am curious about the Jira Server migration. Is there a way to know the original github issue id or link once it was migrated to Jira?

Imagine github issue with id 46 has been migrated to Jira issue GH-58. Now in GH-58 I need to know the origin of the issue, namely the id of the original github issue (46 in my example). Or the url to github issue 46. Does the import process store this info somewhere (custom field or issue property)?

Thanks!

[Andy Heinzer]

I'm afraid that the Jira Server versions of today no longer have this import method as an option.  That said, I don't believe that the old importer would store that specific Github information when the issue was imported into Jira.  

In the current versions of Jira (both Cloud and Server), it would be possible if you exported that data from Github into another format such as CSV, that you could potentially map values like that into a custom field if you choose to.  But this is not something that I believe the old importer was doing.  This is only something that the CSV or JSON import methods could potentially map into the issue in Jira.

[Andriy Kozynets]

Thanks, Andy!

I am aware that the github importer is not available anymore in the latest Jira versions. However I can still use it on earlier versions.

In case anyone is curious about it:

My further research shows that the importer does create a custom field where it stores the ID of the imported github issue. The name of the custom field is External issue ID.

Unfortunately, it only stores the id (no gihub repo name or link which would be useful). Also, it creates this field on every import. So if you want to import several github repos in several takes - you will have as many custom fields named "External issue ID" as the number of imports you have run.