At 10gen we use JIRA as our main bug tracker. We use a few different custom python scripts to generate charts that track everything from customer engagement to the number of server tickets linked to support tickets.

Unfortunately, before JIRA’s REST interface was available, the majority of this stuff was done with the suds package and a few hand written calls to urllib (all of this was written well before the time of the brilliant requests package). Now we attack these problems with a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. So, in walks jira-python a tiny wrapper over JIRA’s REST API written by Ben Speakmon. It’s about 100x better than anything we currently use… that is until we try to use it.

As it turns out http basic authentication doesn’t work at all with the current distribution and apparently my pull request doesn’t meet Atlassian standards. This means I have to write a wrapper over their code until it’s fixed. I had never had to override another class before but it was fairly straight forward and I thought I’d preserve the pattern on this blog so that I could come back to it at some point.

Here’s the code: