One diagram, used everywhere in the course. Scroll and it tells the story one step at a time. Switch between Technical and Kitchen to see how each part maps onto the restaurant: the boxes never move, only their names change.
How Forge fits together
Three places matter: your laptop, where you write code; the browser, where Jira shows your UI; and the Atlassian cloud, where your functions run.
In the kitchen: Three places: your home kitchen, where you write the playbook; front of house, where staff see the cards; and back of house, where the cooking happens.
Lives on your laptop · Home kitchen
Your code The playbook
The JavaScript in your app folder: the frontend that draws the UI and the functions that run in the cloud.
How your kitchen works, written down. Not to be confused with recipes, which come from the supplier.
Select any box in the diagram to see what it is.
Three places. You write code on your laptop. People use your app in their browser, inside Jira. The code runs in the Atlassian cloud, next to Jira’s data. In this course they are the home kitchen, front of house and back of house.
Your code and its manifest travel together. The app is a folder: JavaScript in
src/and amanifest.ymlthat says what the app adds to Jira and what it may do. The Forge CLI is the only thing that carries it into the cloud.Deploy.
forge deployuploads a new version. Atlassian hosts it: no servers, no containers, no databases to run yourself.Install.
forge installputs the app on one site, once. From then on, every deploy reaches that site by itself. Use your own developer site, never your company’s.A click becomes a call. The app’s UI runs in the browser. When it needs something only the backend can do, it calls
invoke()with a name, and a resolver function in the cloud answers.Reading Jira safely. The resolver reads the work item it is shown on, as the person viewing it. The manifest has to grant that permission, called a scope, or Jira says no.
Secrets stay in the back. The key for the outside service comes from an encrypted variable, read only by backend code. It never appears in the code or reaches the browser.
Calling outside Atlassian. Forge blocks calls to other hosts unless the manifest lists them. The course calls API Ninjas for recipes, so
api.api-ninjas.comgoes on the list.The answer comes back. The resolver returns the recipe, and UI Kit draws it on the work item. That round trip is all of Level 1, built one step at a time.
Longer jobs wait their turn. Every function has a time limit. In Level 2, a page saves a job in storage, pushes a small event onto a queue and answers at once, so nobody waits.
AI, hosted by Atlassian. A consumer function picks up the event later and asks Forge LLM to read meeting notes and list the dishes. The model runs inside Atlassian’s platform.
Back into Jira and Confluence. The consumer creates a work item per dish, writes a Confluence page, and a Rovo agent can research the dishes. Each of these is a new box on the same diagram.