Boartty

Boartty is a console-based interface to the Storyboard task-tracking system.

As compared to the web interface, the main advantages are:

• Workflow -- the interface is designed to support a workflow similar to reading network news or mail. In particular, it is designed to deal with a large number of stories across a large number of projects.
• Offline Use -- Boartty syncs information about changes in subscribed projects to a local database. All review operations are performed against that database and then synced back to Storyboard.
• Speed -- user actions modify locally cached content and need not wait for server interaction.

Installation

Source

When installing from source, it is recommended (but not required) to install Boartty in a virtualenv. To set one up:

virtualenv boartty-env
source boartty-env/bin/activate

To install the latest version from the cheeseshop:

pip install boartty

To install from a git checkout:

pip install .

Boartty uses a YAML based configuration file that it looks for at ~/.boartty.yaml. Several sample configuration files are included. You can find them in the examples/ directory of the source distribution or the share/boartty/examples directory after installation.

Select one of the sample config files, copy it to ~/.boartty.yaml and edit as necessary. Search for CHANGEME to find parameters that need to be supplied. The sample config files are as follows:

minimal-boartty.yaml

Only contains the parameters required for Boartty to actually run.

reference-boartty.yaml

An exhaustive list of all supported options with examples.

openstack-boartty.yaml

A configuration designed for use with OpenStack's installation of Storyboard.

You will need a Storyboard authentication token which you can generate or retrieve by navigating to Profile, then Tokens (the "key" icon), or visiting the /#!/profile/tokens URI in your Storyboard installation. Issue a new token if you have not done so before, and give it a sufficiently long lifetime (for example, one decade). Copy and paste the resulting token in your ~/.boartty.yaml file.

The config file is designed to support multiple Storyboard instances. The first one is used by default, but others can be specified by supplying the name on the command line.

Usage

After installing Boartty, you should be able to run it by invoking boartty. If you installed it in a virtualenv, you can invoke it without activating the virtualenv with /path/to/venv/bin/boartty which you may wish to add to your shell aliases. Use boartty --help to see a list of command line options available.

Once Boartty is running, you will need to start by subscribing to some projects. Use 'L' to list all of the projects and then 's' to subscribe to the ones you are interested in. Hit 'L' again to shrink the list to your subscribed projects.

In general, pressing the F1 key will show help text on any screen, and ESC will take you to the previous screen.

Boartty works seamlessly offline or online. All of the actions that it performs are first recorded in a local database (in ~/.boartty.db by default), and are then transmitted to Storyboard. If Boartty is unable to contact Storyboard for any reason, it will continue to operate against the local database, and once it re-establishes contact, it will process any pending changes.

The status bar at the top of the screen displays the current number of outstanding tasks that Boartty must perform in order to be fully up to date. Some of these tasks are more complicated than others, and some of them will end up creating new tasks (for instance, one task may be to search for new stories in a project which will then produce 5 new tasks if there are 5 new stories).

If Boartty is offline, it will so indicate in the status bar. It will retry requests if needed, and will switch between offline and online mode automatically.

If Boartty encounters an error, this will also be indicated in the status bar. You may wish to examine ~/.boartty.log to see what the error was. In many cases, Boartty can continue after encountering an error. The error flag will be cleared when you leave the current screen.

To select text (e.g., to copy to the clipboard), hold Shift while selecting the text.

Terminal Integration

If you use rxvt-unicode, you can add something like the following to .Xresources to make Storyboard URLs that are displayed in your terminal (perhaps in an email or irc client) clickable links that open in Boartty:

URxvt.perl-ext:           default,matcher
URxvt.url-launcher:       sensible-browser
URxvt.keysym.C-Delete:    perl:matcher:last
URxvt.keysym.M-Delete:    perl:matcher:list
URxvt.matcher.button:     1
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1:  https:\/\/storyboard.example.org/#!/story/(\\d+)[\w]*
URxvt.matcher.launcher.1: boartty --open $0

You will want to adjust the pattern to match the Storyboard site you are interested in; multiple patterns may be added as needed.

Contributing

For information on how to contribute to Boartty, please see the contents of the CONTRIBUTING.rst file.

Bugs

Bugs are handled at: https://storyboard.openstack.org/