Robby on Rails : Lighthouse tickets and Git branching

Lighthouse tickets and Git branching

Posted by Robby Russell Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:36:00 GMT

28 comments Latest by ugg boots Sat, 21 Aug 2010 06:20:56 GMT

We’re currently using Lighthouse as our ticketing system with clients for maintenance/bug requests. We’re also using Github for all of our major client projects. I’m sure that many of you take advantage of the Lighthouse service that Github allows you to use so that your commits can trigger actions on your tickets in Lighthouse.

If you’re not already, you might consider running (cheat ?):

cheat lighthouse


lighthouse:
  - Commit comment [#213]
  Adds message as comment to ticket #213

    * tagged - adds tag to the ticket (does not replace)
    * responsible - sets the user responsible for ticket (responsible:none to
    clear)
    * milestone - sets the milestone for ticket (milestone:none to clear)
    * state - sets state (new, open, hold, resolved, invalid)

  - Commit comment [#213 tagged:committed responsible:johan milestone:"Launch" 
  state:resolved]

With your commit messages, you can just pass in the ticket # and resolve your ticket without needing to interact with Lighthouse too much.

Okay, so one of the problems that I’ve had with this process is that I have had to constantly look back in my browser to see what the ticket # was that I was working on. So, I decided to start writing it down on a notepad as I was working through tickets so that I could look down at my desk, but this wasn’t terribly efficient either.

So, I decided to start leveraging the features of git to help me out. For each ticket that I work on, this is my process.

In Lighthouse, I decide which ticket I’m going to work on next. I then create a local branch using the ticket # in the name. Example: LH_1623

The workflow ends up looking like:

alphaclone git:(master): git checkout -b LH_1615

alphaclone git:(LH_1615): <—I am using zsh and have it display the current local branch

I then work on this ticket. Since I’m working within the branch and my prompt reminds me what ticket # is being worked on, it makes it easy for me to add this into my commit message.

git commit -m "Fixed the do-whacky issue with data importing. [#1615 state:resolved]"

At some point, this will be ready to be merged back into master and pushed to Github.

git checkout master

git merge LH_1615

git push origin master

Github will take your commit message and pass it over to Lighthouse and your ticket will be marked as resolved automatically. This workflow has saved me a lot of time from navigating through Lighthouse and has also helped me stay focused on individual tickets throughout the day. Quite often, I’ll get interrupted by something non-development related and seeing the ticket # in my terminal helps get me back on task.

I’ve managed to encourage a few of the others at Planet Argon to adopt this ticket-based branch process as well so that when we need to collaborate on a ticket we publish the ticket branch to Github so that others can work on it as well. (happens a lot when a designer and developer need to work together on the same issue/feature)

Anyhow, just a quick little introduction to something simple that I did that has definitely helped me become a little more efficient throughout the day. Perhaps you have a better approach and/or tips for others that you’d like to share?