Automation with RT CLI

Ticket automation in Best Practical's RT is by far the easiest with the RT CLI.  I shan't re-hash the documentation but will give an example because it wasn't obvious just how easy it is. Like in Scouts, Be Prepared. A bit of prep makes the RT CLI simple to work with.

1. Setup your .rtrc and .bashrc as a one-off so you can invoke the RT CLI directly
2. Build a search query in the regular RT Web UI
3. Automate the function 

Find the "rt" binary:

[support-email@rt ~]$ locate */rt

/opt/rt4/bin/rt

Add it to your PATH in .bashrc:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/rt4/bin

 Setup your .rtrc file with your credentials rather than giving them on the command line:

[support-email@rt ~]$ cat .rtrc

server http://rt/

user me

passwd xxx

auth rt

Now you can already do some stuff like the examples from the RT CLI page in the wiki:

[support-email@rt ~]$ rt show user/ggee

id: user/832782

Password: ********

Name: GGee

EmailAddress: GGee@example.com

RealName: G Gee

Privileged: 1

Disabled: 0

CF-Employee Department: Applications Software

The last "prep" thing is to create your search criteria. This is far easier in the Web UI like you can build up your Search and then when you click Advanced you can copy that Query text directly and test it out from the CLI:

[support-email@rt ~]$ rt ls -i -q "'Corp Support'" "Status = 'stalled' AND Told < '-1 week'"

ticket/314370

ticket/315571

Now you're ready for some automation.

• The use of "-i" gives the output in a suitable format for processing
• The "-q" option specifies a queue and you need to use quotes (') around names with spaces in them, hence on the CLI you get "'Corp Support'"

The above query is Searching for Stalled tickets which haven't been touched (Told) in over a week. We want to change such tickets to Open so that staff pick up these tickets. For this we can setup a job with cron which pipes the tickets found in a search into an rt edit command.

# un-stalls support tickets NOTE: requires valid creds in .rtrc

@daily /opt/rt4/bin/rt ls -i -q "'Corp Support'" "Status = 'stalled' AND Told < '-1 week'"  | rt edit - set status=open

You can automate all kinds of functionality whether routine activities like this example, or to build helper scripts for large operations like to populate some new custom field or otherwise.