ZenDesk Command Line Tool

Request information from ZenDesk and output it in several forms like JSON, Markdown, or TaskPaper. Some of this is simply easier than using curl; some of it would require more post processing than I want to do.

I pipe the JSON output to jq often. I use the TaskPaper to send to OmniFocus, and I document tickets with a certain format that corresponds to a Ulysses filter.

Configuration

Create a file named .zdapi.json in your home folder. Put the API URL, your agent email, and a valid API key in it like this:

{
	"url": "https://»site«.zendesk.com/api/v2",
	"username": "»agent email«",
	"token": "»API token«"
}

Copy over the file zdapi.json.template to /.zdapi.json to get started.

Usage

There are 5 commands:

1. search — Return JSON results for a generic search, for tickets, users, using tags, etc. It doesn’t seem to work with “id:»id number«” though.
2. user — Return JSON describing a user
3. org — Return JSON describing an organization
4. ticketproject — Generate a TaskPaper format initial project for the ticket
5. ticketnotes — Generate the Markdown ticket notes headline I use

Troubleshooting

I get intermittent SSL errors

As far as I know, this just happens occasionally with ZenDesk’s API. Retry with the same arguments and it will probably work.