Configuration¶

There are many ways to configure rbt in order to associate a Review Board server with a repository. The ideal setup is to configure a repository to point to a Review Board server, so that users can use rbt out of the box, but there are other methods available.

Repository Configuration¶

All repository types support a .reviewboardrc file, which is the recommended way to configure your repository. Through here, you can specify the URL to your Review Board server, the repository name, and provide some helpful defaults.

Alternatively, some types of repositories can have special metadata associated that point to your server, but those don’t support some of the more advanced features of .reviewboardrc.

.reviewboardrc¶

The .reviewboardrc file is a generic place for configuring a repository. This must be in a directory in the user’s checkout path to work. It must parse as a valid Python file, or you’ll see an error when using rbt.

This is the recommended way of configuring your repository to talk to Review Board.

You can generate this file automatically, starting with RBTools 0.5.3, by typing:

$ rbt setup-repo

Just follow the instructions, and it will create your .reviewboardrc. You should then commit this to your repository.

The rest of this section covers some of the more common settings you may want for your .reviewboardrc. You can find more in the documentation for many of the commands. For example, see rbt post’s default options.

REPOSITORY¶

By default, RBTools will try to determine the repository path and pass that to Review Board. This won’t always work in all setups, particularly when different people are checking out the repository with different URLs.

You can use the REPOSITORY setting to specify the name of the repository to use. This is the same as on Review Board’s New Review Request page. For example:

REPOSITORY = 'RBTools'

REVIEWBOARD_URL¶

To specify the Review Board server to use, you can use the REVIEWBOARD_URL setting. This takes the URL to the Review Board server as a value. For example:

REVIEWBOARD_URL = "https://reviewboard.example.com"

TRACKING_BRANCH¶

When using Git or other DVCS repositories, RBTools makes an assumption about the upstream branch, which it needs to know in order to generate a diff. You can set the TRACKING_BRANCH setting to the branch name in order to force the usage of a specific branch. This is equivalent to providing the --tracking-branch option.

We recommend you set this for any .reviewboardrc files on any long-running release or feature branches.

For example:

TRACKING_BRANCH = "origin/release-2.0.x"

BRANCH¶

A review request’s Branch field is a helpful way of seeing where a change is expected to be merged into. You can specify the default for all review requests on a branch by setting the BRANCH field. For example:

BRANCH = "release-2.0.x"

Note that the intent is to show the destination branch, and not the feature branch that the code is being developed on.

This also does not affect code generation. It’s used solely to display to the reviewers where the code will land.

ENABLE_PROXY¶

By default, any configured HTTP/HTTPS proxy will be used for requests. If your server is within your own network, you may want to turn this off. You can do so by setting ENABLE_PROXY to False:

ENABLE_PROXY = False

Git Properties¶

Repository information can be set in a reviewboard.url property on the Git tree. Users may need to do this themselves on their own Git tree, so in some cases, it may be ideal to use dotfiles instead.

To set the property on a Git tree, type:

$ git config reviewboard.url http://reviewboard.example.com

Perforce Counters¶

Repository information can be set on Perforce servers by using reviewboard.url Perforce counters. How this works varies between versions of Perforce.

Perforce version 2008.1 and up support strings in counters, so you can simply do:

$ p4 counter reviewboard.url http://reviewboard.example.com

Older versions of Perforce support only numeric counters, so you must encode the server as part of the counter name. As / characters aren’t supported in counter names, they must be replaced by | characters. | is a special character in shells, so you’ll need need to escape these using \|. For example:

$ p4 counter reviewboard.url.http:\|\|reviewboard.example.com 1

Subversion Properties¶

Repository information can be set in a reviewboard:url property on a directory. This is usually done on whatever directory or directories are common as base checkout paths. This usually means something like /trunk or /trunk/myproject. If the directory is in the user’s checkout, it will be faster to find the property.

To set the property on a directory, type:

$ svn propset reviewboard:url http://reviewboard.example.com .

Custom User Configuration¶

You can provide your own defaults for RBTools by creating a .reviewboardrc file in your HOME directory (usually /home/username on Linux, $USERPROFILE\Local Settings\Application Data on Windows).

You might use this to automatically open your browser when posting a review request (by setting OPEN_BROWSER = True), or to disable your HTTP proxy (ENABLE_PROXY = False), for example.