Can I programmatically delete custom fields in jira?

[dmitri]

related to:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/51896

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/9868061

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/13416427

i want to delete hundreds of custom fields. is it possible to do this without clicking through the UI for each custom field?

[Tuncay Senturk · Accepted solution]

Hi Dmitri,

If you write your own plugin or use Script runner, below code can simply delete custom fields. 

CustomFieldManager customFieldManager = ComponentAccessor.getCustomFieldManager();
Collection<CustomField> customFields = customFieldManager.getCustomFieldObjects();
for (CustomField field: customFields) {
	if (checkFieldToBeDeleted(field)) {
		customFieldManager.removeCustomField(field);
	}
}

As far as I know there is no REST support yet to do that, but there is a quite old open issue regarding that.

Hope it helps,

Tuncay

[dmitri]

Perfect. Thanks.

[Alexey Dorofeyev]

Before deleting custom fields you can review their values using Custom Fields Usage plugin

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/systems.npe.jira.cfu/server/overview

[Richard Cross]

Can anyone from Adaptavist elaborate on how to delete a bunch of custom fields quickly with ScriptRunner for JIRA?  For example, I'd like to delete all the fields starting "abc".

[Tuncay Senturk]

Hi Rıchard,

Actually you can do that with the script above (I provided).

within checkFieldToBeDleted function all you need to do is return true if custom field's name starts with "abc". Similar as below

def checkFieldToBeDeleted(field) {
	return field.name.startsWith("abc")
}

[Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps)]

You can use the removeCustomField action from JIRA Command Line Interface (CLI). You may want to wrap that with one of the run actions like runFromCsv or runFromSql.