LinLog

I came across an interesting article on Task Driven Development the other day. I came to it via the recent Linus on branching story on Slashdot.

One of the first things mentioned in that article is that you need an issue tracking system and it needs to be integrated with your source control system. After a moment's consideration, I said to myself, "That's a good idea." I've been thinking lately about getting back into doing some open-source stuff as well as some educational projects for myself, and something like that might be helpful. In the past, I usually didn't bother to track bugs and features in my personal projects, unless you count post-it notes and unorganized text files, because, well, they were personal projects and it just didn't seem important. However, now I'm used to living and dying by Jira and am fully aware of how crazy it is to think I'm just going to remember all the bugs I find and potential features I think up.

So, to that end, I installed a copy of Mantis on my site. I settled on Mantis, after a good 5 minutes of careful research, based largely on the facts that the article recommended it and that the requirements were low enough that I could run it on my cheap-ass shared hosting account. Fortunately, it seems nice enough so far - not radically different from Bugzilla or Jira, but OK.

Anyway, I came across a slight snag in setting up the Mantis integration with my Subversion repository. You see, Mantis supplies a script that can be called from Subversion's post-commit hook that will update any issues referenced in the commit message. However, the script is written on the assumption that Mantis and SVN live on the same box. In fact, that is not the case - SVN lives on my local Windows 7 box, while Mantis lives on my hosting provider's box, to which I do not have shell access (yes, I'm that cheap).

With a little Googling, I was able to turn up a few useful resources to help me get this set up. This article gave a nice overview of SVn hooks and Mantis integration, while this one provided a nice perspective for SVN on Windows. However, I had to cobble these together to make it work on my system.

My main problem with the documentation I had was my lack of SSH access to the box on which I'm running Mantis - all the articles I found assumed you had it. So the first order of business was a simple gateway PHP script to wrap the command-line Mantis script that would normally be run via SSH. Therefore I quickly banged out this do_checkin.php script and dropped it in a web-accessible directory.

<?php
# Very cheap security measure, simply so that just *anybody* can't post issues.
if ($_POST['secret'] !== 'somePasswordHere') {
   exit;
}

$cmd = 'php checkin.php <<< ' . escapeshellarg($_POST['message']);
system($cmd);


Next was the Subversion hook. I'm using SlikSVN, and it turns out that this will only execute hook scripts that are .exe or .bat files. I know this because I tried to write a Powershell hook script and it didn't work. But no worries - it's easy enough to write a wrapper batch post-commit.bat file such as this:

@ECHO OFF

SET REPOS=%1
SET REV=%2

CD %REPOS%\hooks
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe %REPOS%\hooks\post-commit.ps1 "%REPOS%" "%REV%"


For the Powershell script, it was easy enough to just port the BASH script posted in the previously linkd article. However, instead of calling the Mantis checkin.php script by SSH, I actually just used wget to send a POST to the do_checkin.php posted above.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Web") | Out-Null

$REPOS = $args[0]
$REV = $args[1]

"$REPOS $REV"

$svnlook = 'C:\Program Files\SlikSvn\bin\svnlook.exe'

$auth = & $svnlook author -r $REV $REPOS
$dt = & $svnlook date -r $REV $REPOS
$changed = & $svnlook changed -r $REV $REPOS
$changed = $changed -join "`n"
$log = & $svnlook log -r $REV $REPOS
$log = $log -join "`n"
$data = "Changeset [${REV}] by $auth, $dt
$log
$changed"

$postData = "secret=somePasswordHere&message="
$postData += [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($data)

C:\Cygwin\bin\wget.exe -O req.out --post-data=$postData http://yoursite.com/path/to/mantis/scripts/do_checkin.php
rm req.out


This seems to work fine in my testing. We'll see if that changes once I start adding in bugs and features for my projects and then writing the code to complete them. Hopefully that process will be somewhat easier for being more organized.