Index Jira Tickets

By the end of this guide, your Jira tickets will be indexed and searchable — from the CLI and from AI assistants like Claude Desktop.

Prerequisites

Indexed installed
A Jira Cloud or Server/Data Center instance
An API token (Cloud) or personal access token (Server/DC)

Create a Jira API Token

Go to https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens
Click Create API token
Give it a label (e.g., "Indexed CLI")
Copy the token

Add it to your environment:

.env

JIRA_API_TOKEN=your_token_here
JIRA_EMAIL=your-email@company.com

Keep tokens out of version control

Store your .env file in the project root and add it to .gitignore.

Go to your Jira profile → Personal Access Tokens
Click Create token
Copy the token

Add it to your environment:

.env

JIRA_API_TOKEN=your_personal_access_token

Create a Collection

Use a JQL query to select which tickets to index:

Terminal

indexed index create jira \
  -c eng-tickets \
  -u https://company.atlassian.net \
  -q "project = ENG AND created >= -90d"

Indexing collection 'eng-tickets'...
  Fetched 142 issues from Jira
  Parsed 142 documents
  Created 318 chunks
  Generated embeddings
✓ Collection 'eng-tickets' created (318 chunks, 12.4 MB)

Verify

Terminal

indexed index inspect eng-tickets

Collection: eng-tickets
  Type:       jira
  Source:     https://company.atlassian.net
  Query:      project = ENG AND created >= -90d
  Documents:  142
  Chunks:     318
  Size:       12.4 MB
  Created:    2025-03-15 14:30:22

Search

Terminal

indexed index search "authentication timeout issues" -c eng-tickets

Results for 'authentication timeout issues' (top 5):

1. [eng-tickets] ENG-1847: SSO refresh token expiration handling
   Score: 0.84
   ...Users are experiencing session drops when the SSO refresh
   token expires during long-running operations...

2. [eng-tickets] ENG-2103: Login timeout after IdP migration
   Score: 0.78
   ...After migrating to the new identity provider, login
   requests are timing out for users on VPN...

Notice how searching "authentication timeout issues" found tickets about "SSO refresh token expiration" and "login timeout after IdP migration" — semantic search understands meaning, not just keywords.

Common JQL Patterns

Goal	JQL
Recent tickets	`project = ENG AND created >= -90d`
Current sprint	`project = ENG AND sprint in openSprints()`
Bugs only	`project = ENG AND type = Bug`
High priority	`project = ENG AND priority in (High, Critical)`
Specific component	`project = ENG AND component = "API"`
Resolved recently	`project = ENG AND resolved >= -30d`
All open issues	`project = ENG AND status != Done`

Keep It Fresh

Jira tickets change over time. Update your collection to pull in new and modified tickets:

Terminal

indexed index update eng-tickets

See Keep Collections Up to Date for automation patterns.

Troubleshooting

Authentication errors

Jira Cloud: Ensure both JIRA_EMAIL and JIRA_API_TOKEN are set. The email must match the Atlassian account that created the token.
Jira Server/DC: Ensure JIRA_API_TOKEN is set with a valid personal access token.

Empty results

Verify your JQL returns results by running it in Jira's issue search first.
Check that the Jira URL is correct and includes the protocol (https://).

Rate limiting

If you're indexing a large number of tickets and hit rate limits, Indexed will retry automatically. For very large projects (1000+ tickets), consider narrowing your JQL query.

What's Next

Index Jira Tickets

Connect to Claude Desktop

Index Confluence Pages

Keep Collections Up to Date

On this page