Tips, tricks and traps to think of before pushing my first app to the Jira Marketplace

Hi,

I will very soon push my Forge app to the Jira marketplace. I’ve found some very good info from Atlassian to help me prepare for this but I wanted to tap into this community to have additional pointers from people who had issues moving their app from development all the way to production.

Here are a few things that are currently on my mind:

Fonts
I can’t figure out why some texts are including the right fonts while others are. I’m using Material UI with Create-React-App for the UI. Has anyone experienced similar issues around fonts? Is it related to Jira’s very own CSS and it is conflicting in some way with the app?

console.log() messages in production
I have a few console.log messages in dev right now. Is there an easy way to turn them off for production? Will they be turned off automatically?

Update cycle
As users will find bugs, what is the deployment cycle? Do I fix the bugs in the development environment, push it to staging to be tested by my customer, and when it’s ready, I push it to production with a new version? Are there additional steps I should keep in mind? Is the approval process for an update faster than when a new app is released? It was recommended to me to use a generic account at my company to do those fixes.

Licensing
I’ve found this page does a very good job with details around licensing. But it doesn’t talk about a 30-day free trial or anything of the sort? Does someone know how I configure a trial period?

In the past, I had an organization that would install the free trial of a Jira marketplace app, uninstall it after 30 days, and reinstalls it for another 30 days for free. Is there a way of blocking this tactic?

I’m thinking of showing a message box if my app is not licensed. Is that what you do and if so, do you put a link pointing to your app page on the Jira marketplace?

Marketplace listing
This page gives a lot of detailed info about creating a listing. It talks about creating a vendor account. Should I separate this account from the developer account I’m using for pushing updates of the application?

If you have additional tricks or pitfalls I should keep in my mind, feel free to share.

Louis-Philippe

1 Like

Hi Louise,

I can try and help you answer some of these questions:

Fonts
Not too sure about this one - which fonts aren’t loading correctly? Have you made sure that any relevant CSP rules are in effect:?

console.log() messages in production
console messages aren’t removed in production - your best bet is to probably remove them as part of the build process using something like this Webpack option (if you’re using webpack)

Update cycle
As far as I know there isn’t an approval process for Forge app updates - they happen automatically when a new version is detected in the production environment. Customers start using the new version and your Marketplace listing will be updated to list the newly-deployed version (with an auto-generated “Minor update” version).

Licensing
I don’t believe there’s a way to configure the trail period, this page says:

They first enter into a 30-day free trial for your app, which automatically rolls into a paid subscription

Not sure about blocking the re-installation tactic.

The message when not licensed is the makes sense and is very common practice - not sure about including a link to the Marketplace listing because generally a user would have already installed the app from the Marketplace already, perhaps a link to your website/support could be more useful?

Marketplace listing

Can’t speak to this one as I’ve just used the same account.

Hope these were helpful :slight_smile:

1 Like

Thank you Josh for your answers. It helped me figure some stuff out.