Convert markdown to the markup format used in jira

The markup language used in jira is not very common. In contrast, Markdown is widely used and editing it is supported by a lot of editors. I like to keep my documentation in markdown, but when I need to paste them into jira forms, this doesn't work very well. This is where this small command-line tool helps. It uses the great pulldown-cmark library for reading the CommonMark flaver of Markdown either from stdin or from a file, and converts it to the format used in jira, either to stdout or to a file.

Installation

First you need to have a working rustc + cargo installation. This can be achieved by either installing the packages available for your distribution, or through https://rustup.rs/. Then you can can install md2jira by running cargo install -f md2jira. The -f flag forces previous versions to be overwritten.

Example usage

user@host:~/Projects/md2jira$ cat example.md
# Markdown and Jira

I typically write notes in [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).

---

## md2jira can convert:

* Lists
    1. Nested
    2. Ordered
    3. Unordered
* Tables
* Headings
* *Strong*
* **Emphasis**
* ~~Strikethrough~~
* Horizontal rules
* etc…
user@host:~/Projects/md2jira$ md2jira -i example.md
h1. Markdown and Jira

I typically write notes in [Markdown|https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/].

----

h2. md2jira can convert:

* Lists
*# Nested
*# Ordered
*# Unordered
* Tables
* Headings
* _Strong_
* *Emphasis*
* -Strikethrough-
* Horizontal rules
* etc…
user@host:~/Projects/md2jira$ 

Alternatives

• pandoc can convert from and to multiple formats, and it has support for several markdown flavors as well as the jira markup format. Based on what I have experienced from using pandoc, their support for both formats is probably superior to what I implemented in md2jira. Bonus points for conversion into both directions. A conversion can be achieved with a command like this:

  pandoc --from commonmark --to jira example.md