YouTrack is a proprietary, commercial browser-based bug tracker, issue tracking system and project management software developed by JetBrains. There is also a REST API provided which allows for various actions to be performed programmatically. In this article I will describe the cmdlets I have created to create issues for projects which leverage the Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet to interact with the REST API using Windows PowerShell.
The cmdlets require a minimum of Windows PowerShell 3.0 and uses the response object for HTML content without Document Object Model (DOM) parsing, this is required when Internet Explorer is not installed on the local instance invoking the cmdlets. An example of a use case for the cmdlets, is to be configured as an event handler from an infrastructure monitoring solution which will create issues for alarms raised.
The REST API is enabled by default and you can confirm connection and access permissions by browsing to ‘http://{baseURL}/rest/admin/project’ which should return an XML file with a list of all the projects. A more detailed description of the REST API can be found at https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/YTD65/YouTrack+REST+API+Reference.
In this example, we are using cookie-based authorization. However this process can be adapted to also used Hub OAuth 2.0 authentication as well, which is described at https://www.jetbrains.com/hub/help/1.0/OAuth-2.0-Authorization.html.
Firstly, we need to establish a connection to the REST API using specified credentials and store the web request session object using the session variable. This will allow for cookie information to be re-used for use in subsequent web requests. The specified parameters of login and password are required to be used in the POST method as below:
POST /rest/user/login?{login}&{password}
The cmdlet Connect-YouTrack establishes a connection by specifying the YouTrack Uri, Username and Password parameters and returns the web request session object, which in this example I am storing in the Connection variable.
$Connection = Connect-YouTrack -YouTrackUri http://server1 -Username administrator -Password P@55Word!
Once a connection has been established and the web session object has been returned, we can now create an issue in a project and specify a summary and description. The cmdlet ‘New-YouTrackItem’ will invoke a PUT request to the REST API with the specified parameters of project, summary and description as below.
PUT /rest/issue?{project}&{summary}&{description}
Once the item has been created, the URI of the new issue is retrieved from the response header and using a regular expression pattern match we retrieve the item number so that we can use a subsequent web request to update the item with additional information as a variable, in this example ‘NewIssue’. The Connection variable returned when establishing a connection to the REST API is passed to the session variable for authentication.
$NewIssue = New-YouTrackItem -YouTrackUri http://server1 -Project YT -Summary "Summary API Rest Method" -Description "Description API Rest Method" -SessionState $Connection
Finally, we want to apply a command to the issue created to update items with specified paramaters, as below.
POST /rest/issue/{issue}/execute?{command}
The cmdlet ‘Update-YouTrackItem’ specifies a mandatory parameter named ‘ExecuteCommand’ to specify all the items you wish to update in the issue. In this example, I will be invoking a command to set the priority as ‘High’, the type as ‘ Service Desk’ and category as ‘Support’ to update the issue previously created from the stored ‘NewIssue’ variable.
Update-YouTrackItem -YouTrackUri http://server1 -Item $NewIssue -ExecuteCommand "priority High type Service Desk category Support" -SessionState $Connection
The cmdlets are available from the below:
Connect-YouTrack – https://github.com/dean1609/PowerShell/blob/master/Functions/Connect-YouTrack.ps1
New-YouTrackItem – https://github.com/dean1609/PowerShell/blob/master/Functions/New-YouTrackItem.ps1
Update-YouTrackItem – https://github.com/dean1609/PowerShell/blob/master/Functions/Update-YouTrackItem.ps1
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