Are you looking for ways to make your work in Atlassian products faster and easier? Forge Automation Actions can help! With these actions, you can automate repetitive tasks in Jira, saving time and reducing mistakes.

In this blog, I’ll explain what Forge Automation Actions are, how they work, and how you can use them to improve your daily workflows. Let’s get started!

What they are

Forge Automation Actions are custom automation steps built with Forge, Atlassian’s cloud development platform. They let everyone add their own actions to the Automation rule builder in Jira.

From a user’s point of view, they look and feel like any other automation action:
you pick a trigger, choose an action from the list, fill in a simple form, and save the rule.

From a Forge point of view, each Automation Action is:

• A Forge app that defines a custom automation action.
• Configured inside Automation, using a UI provided by the Forge app.
• Executed as a Forge function, running in Atlassian’s infrastructure (no servers to manage).
• Able to call Atlassian APIs and talk to external services (like your internal systems or other SaaS tools).

This unlocks more powerful automations that other people in your team can easily use, just by selecting the action in Automation.

Example: Automating Customer Insights in Jira

Let’s walk through an example. Imagine you have a Forge Automation Action that helps your team enrich Jira work items with customer information from your CRM. When the automation rule runs, the Forge action reads details from the issue—like the work item key and a custom field for the customer ID. It then connects to your external CRM system using an API call to fetch up-to-date customer data. Inside the action, you can apply your own logic, such as checking if the customer is a premium account to match your needs. The action then returns the customer details for Automation to update the Jira work item with new details, like the customer’s plan, value, or risk score.

Why use Forge Automation Actions?

The Forge platform gives you many ways to build automations. You can listen to Jira events directly in a Forge app, run scheduled jobs, react to external systems, or connect Automation to Forge using a “Send web request” step. All of these are powerful patterns, and they are described in the Building automations with Forge documentation.

However, Forge Automation Actions stand out because they put your custom logic directly in the Automation rule builder. This means your action appears alongside native actions, making it easy for anyone to discover, configure, and reuse—without writing code.

On top of what Automation can do on its own, a Forge action can call Jira and external REST APIs, apply custom business logic, and pass the results back into the rule.

Built into the Automation rule builder

With full integration into the Automation rule builder, Forge Automation Actions are just as easy to use as any native action. When creating or editing a rule, admins and rule authors can simply select your custom action from the list, configure it through a user-friendly form, and place it alongside any other steps.
A key advantage is that all filters and conditions for when your action should run are set up directly in the Automation UI—using native conditions and branches—rather than being hard-coded in your app. This keeps your automation logic visible, flexible, and easy to adjust over time, empowering teams to adapt rules as their needs evolve without touching the app code.

Configuration and reuse

Forge Automation Actions are designed for easy configuration and broad reuse. Once an action is made available on a site as part of a Forge app, it can be added to multiple automation rules across different projects and teams. Each team simply configures the action in their rule using the Forge action form and smart values—there’s no need to change any code or redeploy your app. This means you build the action once, and it can be composed and reused in as many rules as needed, empowering teams to adapt automations to their unique workflows without developer involvement.

Smart values and context in input and output

Automation’s smart values and context are fully supported by Forge Automation Actions. When you add your action to a rule, you can use smart values—such as work item fields or dates—as inputs, allowing each rule to pass in the information it needs without hardcoding anything in your app logic.

For example, the issue field you care about might be different in each project (like a different custom field for “Customer ID”). With a Forge Automation Action, you don’t need to hardcode this field in your app logic or set it as an environment variable. Instead, each rule can pass the right field as input using smart values.

Your action can also return smart values in its output, making this data available to subsequent actions in the rule. This enables dynamic branching, messaging, or updates based on real-time results from your Forge action. This is achieved using the inputs and outputs properties of Forge Automation Actions.

As a result, your custom action becomes a composable building block that works seamlessly with all other automation steps—without requiring changes to your app code.

What’s next

Here are some ways to get started or learn more about Forge Automation Actions:

• Try this tutorial: Learn how to integrate with an external requirements management system so that, when a work item is created, the app retrieves and adds the relevant requirement details based on the work item key. Check out the tutorial here.
• Start from the Automation template: When creating a new Forge app, you can use the Automation template. This simple example shows how to call the Jira REST APIs to add a comment when an issue is created, and is there for you to expand on.
• Read more in the documentation: Explore the documentation here to learn about all available properties and options you can use in your Forge Automation Actions.