SalsaFlow

SalsaFlow

Buil status		GoDoc

Overview

SalsaFlow is your ultimate Trunk Based Development (TBD) CLI utility.

Actually, I don't know about you, but we use it here at Salsita.

Installation

SalsaFlow is written in Go. Compiling has never been that fast. No more sword fighting in the corridor, sorry...

Installing from a Package

The pre-built binaries are attached to GitHub releases for this repository.

See the latest release for yourself!

So, to use the pre-built binaries,

1. download the relevant archive, then
2. copy the content to a directory in your PATH. Make sure that all the files are in the same directory.

Installing from Sources

1. Install Go (used Go 1.3.3, but any Go 1.x should do the trick).
2. Set up a Go workspace.
3. Add the bin directory of your workspace to PATH.
4. Run go get -d github.com/salsaflow/salsaflow. This will get the sources and put them into the workspace. You can as well just go and use git clone directly...
5. Run go get github.com/tools/godep to install godep, which handles vendoring.
6. Run make godep-install in the project directory, which puts the resulting binaries into the bin directory of the workspace.
7. Run salsaflow to make sure everything went well.

Other System Requirements

To use SalsaFlow, you will also need

• git version 1.9.x or newer in your PATH

Modules may also require some additional packages to be installed.

Usage

Well, the best thing you can do is to just run salsaflow -h and read. More in-depth SalsaFlow principes are explained in the wiki.

The complete list of SalsaFlow commands follows (links pointing to the develop docs):

• pkg install
• pkg upgrade
• release changes
• release deploy
• release stage
• release start
• repo bootstrap
• repo init
• review post
• story changes
• story open
• story start
• version
• version bump

SalsaFlow can only be used when you are within a project repository. The repository is automagically initialised when you run any SalsaFlow command there. SalsaFlow uses a couple of git hooks, which are installed as a part of the initialisation process.

You probably want to read the following section about SalsaFlow configuration before doing anything serious since SalsaFlow will anyway refuse to do anything useful until it is configured properly.

Configuration

There are two places where SalsaFlow configuration is being kept:

1. The local, project-specific configuration is expected to be placed into .salsaflow directory in the repository root. This directory contains the local configuration file, config.yml, as well as some project-specific custom scripts that are to be supplied by the user and committed into .salsaflow/scripts. More on custom scripts later.
2. The global, user-wide configuration is to be placed into $HOME/.salsaflow.yml. This file mostly contains the data that cannot be committed, i.e. access tokens and such.

Global Configuration

The global, user-specific configuration file resides in $HOME/.salsaflow.yml. The format depends mostly on the modules that are active. No worries, modules are explained later.

The only config that is necessary is a GitHub API token that can be used to read public repositories. It is used for upgrading SF since it accesses GitHub releases for SalsaFlow. So, the format is following:

github:
  token: "your-github-token"

Local Configuration

SalsaFlow looks for the local cofiguration file in .salsaflow/config.yml. The only universally required local configuration keys are

issue_tracker: "<module-id>"
code_review_tool: "<module-id>"

Too see a full example, just check the SalsaFlow config for this project.

Scripts

SalsaFlow occasionally needs to perform an action that depends on the project type, e.g. to increment the version number when handling releases. These custom actions must be configured by placing certain custom scripts into .salsaflow/scripts directory in the repository.

The following scripts must be supplied:

• get_version - Print the current project version to stdout and exit.
• set_version - Taking the new version string as the only argument, this script is expected to set the project version string to the specified value. Make sure all new files are always staged (git add), otherwise they won't get committed by SalsaFlow.

Now, to make the whole scripting thing cross-platform, it is possible to supply multiple script files for every script name and run different scripts on different platforms. So, the filename schema for the scripts that are to be placed into the scripts directory is actually <script-name>_<platform>.<runner> where

• <script-name> is the name as mentioned above, e.g. get_version.
• <platform> can be any valid value for Go's runtime.GOOS, e.g. windows, linux, darwin and so on. You can also use unix to run the script on all Unixy systems.
• <runner> is the file extension that defines what interpreter to use to run the script. Currently it can be bash (Bash), js (Node.js), bat (cmd.exe) or ps1 (PowerShell.exe). Naturally, only some combinations make sense, e.g. you cannot run PowerShell on Mac OS X, so a script called get_version_darwin.ps1 would never be executed.

Check some examples to understand better how the whole thing works.

Project Bootstrapping

To get up to speed quickly, repo bootstrap command can be used to prepare the local configuration file so that the user only fills in the missing values that are clearly marked.

repo bootstrap can be also told to use certain GitHub repository to bootstrap the local configuration directory. When this bootstrapping skeleton is supplied, the contents of the given repository are simply poured into the local configuration directory. This can be easily used to share custom scripts for certain project type so that the scripts are implemented once and then just copied around. You can check the repository that was used to bootstrap SalsaFlow itself.

Modules

SalsaFlow is modular where possible, and the configuration files contain sections where the configuration for these modules is specified.

A module must be first activated:

issue_tracker: "jira"
code_review_tool: "review_board"

This is very close to dependency injection. There are a few module types and it must be specified what implementation to use for the given module type (interface).

Then, when necessary, the module-specific config goes to the section that is names after the module name, for example:

jira:
  server_url: "https://jira.example.com"
  project_key: "SF"
review_board:
  server_url: "https://review.example.com"

The configuration for all available modules is described in more details later.

Modules

SalsaFlow interacts with various services to carry out requested actions. The only supported VCS is Git, so that part is hard-coded in SalsaFlow, but other serviced are configurable in the local configuration file, namely:

• The issue tracker module must be specified under the issue_tracker key. Allowed values are: jira.
• The code review module must be specified under the code_review_tool key. Allowed values are: review_board.

Supported Issue Trackers

JIRA

To activate this module, put the following config into the local configuration file:

issue_tracker: "jira"
jira:
  server_url: "https://jira.example.com"
  project_key: "SF"

where

• server_url is the URL that can be used to access JIRA, and
• project_key is the JIRA project key that the repository is associated with.

The global configuration file must then contain the following additional config:

jira:
  credentials:
    - server_prefix: jira.example.com
      username: "username"
      password: "secret"
    - server_prefix: jira.another-example.com
      username: "another-username"
      password: "another-secret"

where

• server_prefix is being used to bind credentials to JIRA instance. The URL scheme is not being used for matching, hence jira.example.com. You can specify multiple records, the longest match wins.
• username is the JIRA username to be used for the given JIRA instance, and
• password is the JIRA password to be used for the given JIRA instance.

As apparent from the example, there can be multiple server records in the file.

Pivotal Tracker

To activate this module, put the following config into the local configuration file:

issue_tracker: "pivotal_tracker"
pivotal_tracker:
  project_id: 123456

where

• project_id is the Pivotal Tracker project ID, obviously.

The global configuration file must then contain the following additional config:

pivotal_tracker:
  token: "secret-token-goes-here"

where

• token is your personal Pivotal Tracker API token.

Supported Code Review Tools

Review Board

To activate this module, put the following config into the local configuration file:

code_review_tool: "review_board"
review_board:
  server_url: "https://review.example.com"

where

• server_url is the URL that can be used to access Review Board.

Please make sure that RBTools package version 0.6.x is installed. This module relies on the rbt command heavily.

Original Authors

• tchap (for Salsita)
• realyze (for Salsita)

License

MIT, see the LICENSE file.