#hoptracker

Part II Step by Step guide to get hoptracker working for your app. Softwire Intro: Base app for Hoptracker which pulls errors from Hoptoad and adds them as bugs in Pivotal Tracker Project. It is still an alpha stage app with very basic user interface, no administration module yet, so all details of projects available for all, essentially for internal use as of now. Steps in softwire: 1. Goto http://softwire.sapps.in 2. Click on New app. This will ask you to provide app related details: a) name of your app b) Hoptoad app name (.hoptoadapp.com : Its the portion that softwire is interested in.) c) Hoptoad Auth Key (Get this from hoptoadapp.com) d) Pivotal Tracker Project Id e) Pivotal Tracker Auth Key (Again log into Pivotal to get this) 3. Create the app and see it listed in the listings page. Note the "Id" field of your app (as you will later use it to configure the hoptracker in your app). Bear with me at this point in time for atleast the Id should have been hashed. The next release will have a better approach to this. Thats it, you are done with the registration of your app with softwire and it is now ready to do the bug movement provided it is notified to do so. This notification happens via hoptracker plugin in your app. Lets see how that is done in a bit. Hoptracker Intro: A Rack based app to log hoptoad errors onto Pivotal Tracker. This plugin communicates with softwire (http://softwire.sapps.in) application and notifies whenever an exception occurs. Softwire, then pulls the error from Hoptoad and adds it as a bug in Pivotal Tracker. Steps in hoptracker 1. Drop the plugin in your projects' vendor/plugins folder (script/plugin install [email protected]:sapnasolutions/hoptracker.git). 2. In the environment.rb add the following line: config.middleware.use 'Hoptracker::Rack' 3. Create hoptracker.rb file in your initializers and drop in this line: Hoptracker.app_id= (This is the Id that you got as part of app creation on softwire.) 4. Restart your server and start getting your hoptoad errors onto your pivotal tracker project. Enjoy! P.S: This is still a work in progress project and does not contain an admin interface nor does it have any test cases! :( . Contributions are welcome and appreciated!

Part I Background: At Sapna, we use: 1) Pivotal Tracker for project management where all the stories/ chores and bugs go in. 2) And we use Hoptoad to notify errors in the app. The problem: Once an error comes to the mail box or we check it out at app.hoptoadapp.com, one needed to copy paste the error into Pivotal Tracker so as to track the error to completion. And this is manual job of copy/paste and sometimes, one tends to forget to the same. So we saw a need to automatically move errors from hoptoad into pivotal tracker. As of now Hoptoad support adding tickets to lighthouse projects for a price (check: hoptoadapp.com). So this got us started on Hoptracker. Initial design: We wanted to write this rack app (hoptracker) which checks the response headers to see for errors and if found: 1. Check hoptoad for latest errors 2. Check pivotal tracker for the list of hoptoad errors (we add the hoptoad error id as part of the story/bug name). Any delta that it results in. 3. We add them to Pivotal tracker. This would work fine but the problem here is that for every error, all the 3 steps would usually run and then the response would be sent to the user, which potentially will slow down the app, which is not desired. Alternate design considerations: If we moved these steps to a background process and not interfere with the response, then that would be ideal. So we planned to use delayed_job to do the background processing of the same. Then again, the plugin hoptracker will come with a dependency that every app which would use hoptracker needs to have delayed_job gem installed and the table created. A dependency like this, we did not want to inject. Moving forward, we thought it would be right to move these steps to a small app which is doing the work for all our apps, more like a Saas. Thus softwire was born. The negatives of such an approach is that, we now need to have an admin interface in softwire where apps need to be registered with the necessary (hoptoad/ pivotal tracker) details. But then we voted that this is a much cleaner approach and hence built it. How did we solve: Hoptracker: The hoptracker plugin which still is a rack app, on receipt of an error just notifies softwire of the error. Softwire: Each app as part of using the hoptracker plugin, needs to first register with softwire and provide app related (hoptoad, pivotal tracker) details. Softwire then produces a unique hash which needs to be provided to the hoptracker initializer in ones app. Please checkout the readme of hoptracker and softwire) for further details or read up part II for a step by step usage of hoptracker/softwire. Once the above process is done. Softwire maintains a local database of all the hoptoad errors already logged into pivotal tracker. Hence the second step ("Check pivotal tracker for the list of hoptoad errors (we add the hoptoad error id as part of the story/bug name). Any delta that it results in.") is avoided by looking into the local database of errors and the delta set of errors are built locally. And then the third step of insertion of new errors into pivotal tracker happens. Checkout Part II for a step by step tutorial in using hoptracker and softwire.