This week I needed to do some analysis of JIRA tickets that goes beyond the reporting JIRA provides — not entirely an uncommon task. My usual quickie toolkit for that purpose involves Jupyter notebooks, which I prefer over downloading CSVs and playing with spreadsheets because I can automate the notebooks given a JIRA API key.
In this case, though, I really want one of my PMs to be able to run these reports, and I don’t want to get into the whole “OK then type this at the command line” thing. The post title kind of gives this away, but after some thought I realized, hey, just check the notebook into the company’s GitHub and there we go.
But how about that API key? Obviously I don’t want to embed mine in the notebook. Is there some way to use GitHub secrets for this? Answer: yes, there is, and it’s really simple, but I don’t see it documented step by step anywhere else so I’m gonna do that here.
If you want the quick answer: GitHub makes secrets available as environment variables, and if you’re working in the GitHub Jupyter environment, you don’t need to do anything special with workflows to make that happen. Therefore, you can just use Python’s os.environ mapping object to get at secrets.