Amethyst Reese

Today marks an incremental release to the Source Integration plugin framework for MantisBT, now at version 0.16.3. This marks the introduction of support for using an API key to authorize inbound changeset data from repository data sources. It is initially supported for integration with Github, where large array of servers made it all but impossible to whitelist allowed IPs for remote commit data.

Future plans for the feature include support for configuring multiple API keys simultaneously, as well as adding support for using the API keys from other data sources, such as SVN or Gitweb repositories. Additionally, the old options for listing allowed IP addresses is now considered deprecated, and will likely be removed entirely at the next major release.

To set up an API key in your MantisBT instance, visit the Repository Configuration page, where you will find a new option labelled, strangely enough, “API Key”. You will need to generate your own key; the best way to do this is on a machine with OpenSSL by running the following command to create a secure, random string of hexadecimal digits, and then copying the resulting string to MantisBT:

$ openssl rand -hex 12

Once this is done, you can enable this on your Github projects by visiting the Service Hooks admin page for your repositories, activating the MantisBT hook, and copying the same key string into the “Api Key” field there. Any future pushes to your Github repo should send data to your MantisBT install using the API key to authorize the data submission.

Context: BarCamp Rochester — Anyone and everyone is invited to attend, and everyone is highly encouraged to present something of their own, no matter what it is. It’s happening this weekend at RIT, where I’m studying (and graduating in about a month!) for Software Engineering.

I’ll be attending it to give a presentation on MantisBT and the Source Integration framework. Specifically, I’ll be covering the myriad of new features that have made it into the project over the past week and a half. I plan to walk through setting up a project in Mantis, creating a new repository on GitHub, linking the Source Integration framework to that, and showing how the branch mapping and auto-resolving features work. Should be interesting.

After the presentation, I plan to post the slides, along with my presentation notes, up here. If anyone decides to video the talk, I’ll also make sure I can get a copy of that as well, but no promises.

Cheers!

With the ongoing work towards a 1.2 release, the Mantis Bug Tracker features a brand new plugin and event system, which will allow users to implement entirely new features for MantisBT without ever needing to touch any of the core codebase. It’s a very extensible system, and allows plugin authors to implement only what they need, while still allowing advanced plugins as much flexibility as possible. Plugins can be as small as a single file with 20 lines of code, or as large as entire hierarchies of files, pages, with their own API’s.

As the core developer of the new plugin system, I have been working on a variety of plugins. In particular, I have created a vastly improved method of integrating source control repositories within MantisBT. The plugin package is named, aptly enough, Source Integration, and implements a generic framework that will allow integration with multiple repositories, each potentially using any source control systems available, simply by creating an extension plugin for each new tool. Currently, I have implemented integration packages for both Git and Subversion, my two source control tools of choice.

The Source Integration package tracks repository information based on a series of changesets, each of which may have a list of affected files. The data representation is generic enough to cover version control concepts used by all types of tools, from the ubiquitous CVS and Subversion, to modern distributed tools like Git and Hg. However, the system takes the stance of implementing as few details as possible, so it relies on existing repository-viewing tools for tasks such as viewing commit diffs, file contents, tree browsing, etc. Extension plugins handle translating tool-specific information, like history logs or checkin data, into the generalized data objects used by the framework. Extensions also generate URL’s for viewing files and diffs, but everything else is handled automatically by the core framework.

The true benefit of the Source Integration package lies in the amount of repository integration that it implements within MantisBT. When importing changesets from your repository, Source looks at the commit message of each changeset for references to bug numbers in your tracker, and sets up links in the database for any bugs mentioned. When viewing bugs mentioned in commit messages, a new section is displayed after the bugnotes called “Related Changesets”, giving a list of linked changes, including information about the changeset, such as the branch, author, timestamp, and a list of changed files.