zendesk-redactor

zendesk-redactor is a command-line interface for the Zendesk Ticket Redaction app.

Motivation

The usability of the Ticket Redaction app is not so good. The redaction form does not support submitting multi-line input, so if you have multiple text snippets that you need to redact, you'd have to input them into the field and click the Redact button for each of them separately, one-by-one. This is very inefficient and time-consuming.

This tool tries to remedy this usability oversight by allowing you to redact multiple text snippets at once by either providing them as command-line arguments, or by writing them into a file and supplying the path to this file as a command-line option.

The tool also allows you to redact attachments, although it is currently not possible to do this selectively - it's either all of them or none of them.

This tool is not a silver bullet though. If you have many text snippets that you need to redact, picking them out of the ticket is still a cumbersome manual process. But this tool will at least allow you to redact all of them at once, instead of clicking Redact for each of them separately.

Installation

It's Python, so make sure you have Python 3 installed, and run:

$ pip install zendesk-redactor

Although not strictly necessary, you might want to either create a virtualenv or use something like pipx.

Usage

Authentication

In order to authenticate to Zendesk API you must provide the organization name, which usually is the subdomain part of your Zendesk URL before zendesk.com (e.g obscura for https://obscura.zendesk.com), your agent email address, and an API token.

These can be provided in two ways.

As command-line options:

$ zredactor --organization obscura --email agent@obscura.com --token BigSecret42

As environment variables:

export ZREDACTOR_ORGANIZATION=obscura
export ZREDACTOR_EMAIL=agent@obscura.com
export ZREDACTOR_TOKEN=BigSecret42

Redacting text snipets

The following command will redact all occurrences of the text snippets foo, bar, baz in the ticket with ID 1742:

$ zredactor --organization obscura --email agent@obscura.com --token BigSecret42 --ticket-id 1742 snippets foo bar baz

Alternatively, if you use environment variables for authentication:

$ zredactor --ticket-id 1742 snippets foo bar baz

The following command will redact all occurrences of the text snippets provided in a file /tmp/to_redact.txt in the ticket with ID 1742:

$ zredactor --organization obscura --email agent@obscura.com --token BigSecret42 --ticket-id 1742 snippets -f /tmp/to_redact.txt

Alternatively, with authentication environment variables set:

$ zredactor --ticket-id 1742 snippets -f /tmp/to_redact.txt

The file must contain one snippet per line.

Redacting attachments

The following command will redact all attachments in ticket with ID 1742:

$ zredactor --organization obscura --email agent@obscura.com --token BigSecret42 --ticket-id 1742 attachments