We won the “honorable mentions” prize in Codegeist 2022
As The Starware, we had participated in Atlassian Codegeist before, but this year we won a prize, “Honorable Mentions” in DevOps category.
Our application allows you to open a terminal inside the Jira Web UI, and from this terminal, you can access Jira using the command line. For a quick introduction, you can check our vide below.
We were working on a command line tool for a while, but Atlassian only allows apps developed with Atlassian’s Forge runtime to participate. Also, the application should be developed within the timeframe of Codegeist 2022. For this reason, we decided to port our standalone command line tool to Forge runtime. But this was a real challenge.
A command line tool inherently depends on the operating system process, TTY, input/output stream, and file system, all of which are not available in Forge runtime. To get it working in Forge runtime, we needed to patch or rewrite more than 10 3rd party dependencies for a few weeks. We needed to handle strange errors like “forge Error: Isolate is already disposed” and lots of snapshot errors in 3rd party dependencies. We simulated process environment, input, and output and were able to redirect these to a terminal that works in custom UI. It was a long journey from the time we started porting 3rd party dependencies to Forge runtime to a simple “Hello World” command output displaying on the UI. For weeks we needed to fix various build errors and dependency issues and patch/re-implement functionalities that don’t exist in the Forge runtime.
In the end, we managed to get it working inside the web terminal. Some commands that require user interactions or display progress for long-running operations do not work yet. Also, some commands that require complex input, like issue creation, don’t work well. We will handle these later. We will also continue to add more commands to cover more usage scenarios. We will implement some utilities that will allow us to redirect the output of one command to another for more advanced usage. Additionally, we will implement a simple file system on top of forge storage so that users can write and save wrong scripts using the tool.
