Troubleshooting

After running a query in jira-select’s shell subcommand, the output results are printed directly to the screen instead of opening in a spreadsheet viewer

The viewer you see being used on in the demo gif is called Visidata, and unfortunately it isn’t available on all platforms. You do have a few options, though:

  1. You could use the --format=table command-line argument to tell jira-select to print your output to the screen in a fancy table mode.

  2. You could ask jira-select to open the query results in your system’s defualt viewer using the --launch-default-viewer command-line argument. On Windows, you will also need to specify an output path explicitly to make this work by using --output=/some/path/to/write/output/to.csv.

  3. If you’re running on Windows, you could install this under “Windows Subsystem for Linux” so that you can use the default viewer (visidata). See more information here: Windows Subsystem for Linux Installation Guide for Windows 10.

  4. You could use the run-query subcommand instead of shell. This particular subcommand is a lot less fancy than shell, though.

Sometimes filtering using having (or sorting using sort_by) on a value I see in the output doesn’t work; why not?

Oftentimes the data returned from Jira for a particular field is not a simple string or number and is instead a complex object full of other information. In those cases, we show the most reasonable string value was can obtain from the object instead of showing you the whole object.

To use such objects in having or sort_by expressions, you should convert them into a reasonable simple data type using one of the functions in Types.

If you’re curious about which fields we’re transforming into strings behind-the-scenes, try wrapping your column in type to see the data’s actual type.

If you want to see the data that is being hidden by the above transformations – for example: for issuetype – you can access the raw Jira object via the raw property of the field; e.g.

select:
  Raw Issue Data: issuetype.raw
from: issues

I can’t connect because my Jira instance uses a self-signed certificate

Don’t worry, there are two command-line arguments you can use for configuring certificate verification:

  • --disable-certificate-verification: For the brave. This will entirely disable certificate verification for this instance when configuring it as well as for all future connections to it.

  • --certificate=/path/to/certificate: For the people who have a security team watching what they’re doing. This will ask jira-select to use a particular self-signed certificate.

These are overrides available for all commands (not just configure) so these arguments can only be used between jira-select and the command you’re running (probably only configure as when you use them with configure those settings will be recorded in your configuration’s settings for the future):

jira-select --disable-certificate-verification configure

When attempting to use a field’s human readable name in curly braces, I get a Parse Error

YAML, the file format we use for queries in jira-select, has some parsing rules that will make it interpret a line starting with a quote, curly brace, bracket, or other reserved characters differently from other lines.

In cases like those, you should just wrap your whole query expression in quotes; for example:

select:
  Story Points: '{Story Points}'
from: issues