JIRA Developer Documentation : JIRA Service Desk development guide

About JIRA Service Desk Development

You can develop plugins for JIRA Service Desk just as you can for other types of Atlassian applications. However, developing for JIRA Service Desk introduces a few wrinkles to the usual development process, as outlined below.

JIRA Service Desk is an application that is built on the JIRA platform and has its own APIs and plugin points. Therefore, to extend JIRA Service Desk, you actually need to create a JIRA plugin that interacts with these integration points in some way.

For now, JIRA Service Desk exposes a few plugin module types for extending Automation in JIRA Service Desk, JIRA Service Desk: Automation Rule Components.

JIRA Service Desk plugin development flow

The high level steps for developing JIRA Service Desk plugins with the SDK are as follows:

Create your plugin project as you would any other JIRA plugin, for instance, by using the atlas-create-jira-plugin SDK command. This command creates the plugin project files and skeleton code.
When ready to build and test your plugin, run the atlas-package command from the project root directory. This command creates a packaged JAR file that you can install into JIRA (in the target sub-directory)
Configure AMPS to run JIRA with JIRA Service Desk installed. If you haven't done this before, see Configure AMPS to run JIRA Core with additional applications installed.
Start up JIRA. For early development and testing, you can use the development instance that the SDK gives you when you run the following command (set the version to 7.0.0 or later): atlas-run-standalone --product jira --version 7.0.0.
Log in to JIRA as an administrator, using the default username and password combination of admin/admin.
Install the plugin you built in step #2 with the atlas-package command. There are two ways that you can do this:
1. Go to the Administration Console and open the "Manage Add-ons" page. On the page, click Upload add-on and choose the JAR file that the atlas-package command generated for you. You'll find the JAR file in the target directory of your project home after running atlas-package.
2. Using the SDK command line tools: using you terminal, step into your project home directory and simply run atlas-install-plugin (after having packaged your plugin JAR using the atlas-package SDK command). This command will simply upload your plugin to UPM (and can considerably shorten your development flow).

You should now be able to see your add-on in the JIRA "Manage Add-ons" page as an installed plugin. Every time you change your plugin code or resources, reload your plugin repeating step #6 above.

Adding the JIRA Service Desk API to your plugin project

If you want to use the JIRA Service Desk API in your plugin project, add a dependency to your plugin POM as follows:

Go to the Java API documentation for the version of JIRA Service Desk that you are using: https://docs.atlassian.com/jira-servicedesk/3.3.1/ (for example).
Add a provided dependency on jira-servicedesk-api to your plugin POM, using the version shown in the documentation (3.3.1 → 3.3.0-REL-0036).

JIRA Service Desk REST API

JIRA Service Desk has its own APIs, separate from the JIRA platform APIs. The REST API for JIRA Service Desk Server is documented here: https://docs.atlassian.com/jira-servicedesk/REST/server/

You can find the links to the other JIRA Service Desk REST API documentation here: JIRA APIs.