jirar

jirar is a modern R client for the Jira REST API. It brings the project-management data in Jira into R as tidy tibbles, so you can analyse issues, projects and more with the tidyverse, data.table, or base R.

It is a ground-up, httr2-based reimagining of the ideas in JirAgileR, updated for today's Jira:

• Works with Jira Cloud and Jira Server / Data Center. The right REST API version, authentication scheme and pagination strategy are selected automatically per deployment.
• Handles the 2025 Cloud search migration. Jira Cloud retired the old offset-paginated /search endpoint; jirar uses the current /search/jql endpoint with token pagination, while Server / Data Center keep classic startAt pagination.
• Tidy output. Nested fields are flattened to snake_case columns (status_name, assignee_displayname, components_name), datetimes are parsed to POSIXct, and Atlassian Document Format bodies are converted to plain text.
• Robust by default. Built on httr2 with automatic retries, informative cli errors, and API-token / Personal-Access-Token authentication.

Installation

You can install the development version of jirar with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("jirar")

Authentication

jirar reads three environment variables by default — set them in your .Renviron (edit with usethis::edit_r_environ()):

JIRA_URL=https://your-domain.atlassian.net
JIRA_USER=you@example.com
JIRA_TOKEN=your-api-token

• Jira Cloud uses your account email as JIRA_USER and an API token as JIRA_TOKEN. Create one at https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens.
• Jira Server / Data Center uses a Personal Access Token: set JIRA_TOKEN and leave JIRA_USER empty (bearer auth), or set both for basic authentication.

Usage

library(jirar)

# Connect once; this verifies your credentials and becomes the session default.
jira_connect()

# List the projects you can see
jira_projects()

# Query issues with JQL
jira_issues(
  jql = "project = ABC AND statusCategory != Done ORDER BY updated DESC",
  fields = c("summary", "status", "assignee", "updated")
)

# How many issues match a query?
jira_count_issues("project = ABC AND created >= -7d")

You can also pass connection details directly, or keep several connections and pass them explicitly via the connection argument:

conn <- jira_connection(
  url   = "https://example.atlassian.net",
  user  = "me@example.com",
  token = Sys.getenv("MY_TOKEN")
)
jira_issues("project = ABC", connection = conn)

Related work

jirar is inspired by Matthias Brenninkmeijer's JirAgileR, reimplemented on a modern stack (httr2, cli, tibble, rlang) with Cloud and Data Center support.