Automation: Triggering Snapshots Automatically Via a Rest Call

Use Cases for Triggering Snapshots Automatically

It’s easy enough to go to a Confluence page and click “Take New Snapshot”, but that requires a manual, human, action.

Some scenarios are so predictable, that you can trigger a new Snapshot via auto-pilot, ensuring the Snapshot will have the correct data even when you are not around:

  1. Weekly status report is due every Friday? Set up a Jira automation scheduled rule, that triggers a new Snapshot every Friday morning.

  2. Using Jira Snapshots to share Jira Service Management status with user? Trigger a Snapshot each time that an applicable update happens in Jira.

  3. Using Jira Snapshot to generate test report? Trigger a newSnapshot directly from your CI/CD pipeline each time your automatic integration tests where executed.

Syntax

The following two parameters are required, and are unique for each Jira Snapshot macro:

  1. A MACRO-SPECIFIC-URL

  2. An API-KEY.

Retrieve these parameters from the macro configuration window, on the “Automation tab”

Copy the API Key- as there is only one opportunity to do that. If you loose the API Key you’ll need to regenerate a new one. The API Key itself is not saved by Jira Snapshot and hence cannot be retrieved again.

Once enabled, SAVE the macro configuration to make this change effective.

 

This is the REST CALL syntax to trigger a new Snapshot for an existing, configured, Jira Snapshot macro:

POST <MACRO-SPECIFIC-URL>

With this obligatory header:

  • jira-snapshots-api-key: <API-KEY>

Here is how it looks on CURL:

 

curl --location --request POST '<MACRO-SPECIFIC-URL>' \ --header 'jira-snapshots-api-key: <API-KEY>'

Revoking The Possibility to Trigger The Snapshot

To remove the possibility to trigger one of the Snapshot macros, you may:

  1. Regenerate the API Key. This will make all existing automations invalid (until they are updated with the new key).

  2. Disable the automation for this specific macro.

 

A Confluence administrator can also revoke all enabled automations.