courier

The Atlassian and Slack MCP tools are the default reach for Jira and Slack. courier installs two bins, jira and slack, to close the gaps those MCPs leave. File bytes and take-backs are the gaps they close today: pulling a ticket's or thread's attachments onto disk, pushing files back up as a Jira attachment or onto a Slack message the MCP can only post text to, and taking a Slack post back off the channel. Whenever a new gap shows up it belongs here too, so treat these bins as a growing toolkit rather than a fixed pair of tricks.

A growing set of commands is never a remembered one, so discover it every run:

1. jira --help and slack --help for the commands that exist right now.
2. <bin> <command> --help for that command's arguments and flags.

--help is generated from the code on disk, which makes it the single source of truth. Anything carried over from an earlier session may already be stale. Read it before composing an invocation, and again when a command surprises you. The commands are built to compose, with --json on each and spinners on stderr, so they pipe into whatever comes next.

Requirements

Both bins come from one package, and both run on Bun:

bun add -g @aabuhijleh/courier

If jira or slack is missing from PATH, stop and give the user that line rather than working around it.

Setup is a hand-off to the user

Each bin needs a credential only a human can create, from a browser page behind their own login: an Atlassian API token for jira, a Slack app and bot token for slack. Both setup commands are interactive prompts, and a prompt has no keyboard in your shell. Give the user the line and wait:

jira setup     # Atlassian API token
slack setup    # Slack app, bot scopes, bot token

An unconfigured bin exits 0 with no data, even under --json. It draws its setup prompt, reads end-of-input, and quits successfully. Read No Jira config found, No Slack config found, or a ◆ ATLASSIAN_BASE_URL or ◆ SLACK_BOT_TOKEN line in the output as a missing credential, not as an empty issue or an empty thread. Hand it over and stop. A re-run lands in the same place.

Let the setup commands write the credential. A token typed into config.json by hand, or passed on a command line, lands in shell history and in your transcript.

jira config and slack config print the path and what is saved, which is how you confirm the hand-off landed. The file is ~/.config/abed-hub/courier/config.json, mode 600.

Jira descriptions carry more than markdown

A description with tickable checkboxes or a screenshot embedded in the body is written as ADF at the REST API. The MCP's markdown conversion escapes checkboxes into literal text, and no CLI command writes a description yet. The call, the media id Jira validates against, and what its two opaque 400s mean: jira-adf.md.

Slack acts as a bot

The slack bin authenticates as a bot user, which decides both what it can reach and how a post lands. No flag gets past these:

• Invited channels only. /invite @<bot> in each channel, private ones included. Once invited it reads that channel's full history, including files posted before it joined. An error about Slack returning an HTML page means the bot is not in that channel, so invite it and retry.
• Its own DMs only. A D… link fails fast. Ask the reporter to repost in a channel.
• Slack Docs and canvases hold no downloadable bytes. Their content comes from the Slack MCP's canvas reader.
• A post is authored by the bot, carrying its name and avatar, with no chat:write.customize scope to dress it up as anyone else. When a human audience would read the message as coming from a person, get the author's sign-off on posting as the bot first.
• It takes back its own posts, and only those. slack delete removes a message the bot posted. A human's survives every token the app holds. Attached files outlive the message unless the delete is told to take them too. An audience may have read it either way, so rehearse an unfinished message in a sandbox channel the bot is already in.
• Message text is mrkdwn, not markdown. Use *bold* and _italic_, where **bold** posts literal asterisks. Files attach to the same message as the text, so a demo lands beside its explanation rather than in a message of its own.
• The app stays internal to the workspace. Public distribution throttles conversations.history and .replies to one request per minute, which makes the CLI unusable.

When a gap isn't covered yet

bun add -g installs a built bundle, so the dist/jira.js on disk is not the source and the next install overwrites an edit to it. The source is packages/courier in abed-hub, and a change there reaches this machine only once the package is published again. Both put a gap in the user's hands:

1. Hand over the invocation you ran and its output verbatim, and name the capability that is missing.

2. Offer to file it, which is where a fix starts. An issue is public, so ask first and run the command once the user says yes:

   gh issue create --repo aabuhijleh/abed-hub \
     --title "jira: <the gap in one line>" \
     --body "What I ran, what came back, what I expected instead."

3. Finish the rest of the task without it, and say which part you left undone.