What's New in Review Board

Today's Review Board release is full of new features, integrations, and improved hosting service support. Let's dive right in.

Link to your Asana and Trello tasks

You can now enable Asana and Trello integrations, adding new fields to your review request for linking up any Asana and Trello tasks your review request relates to.

This works similarly to the Bugs field right now, and opens the doors for tighter integration later.

Post updates to Mattermost and I Done This

Review Board can now post updates about review requests and reviews to Mattermost channels, keeping your team up-to-date. This brings all the benefits that Slack users enjoy, while keeping all updates within your own network.

Updates can also be posted to I Done This, which helps team members build up daily and weekly status reports as they work.

Review code stored on Gerrit

If your company uses Gerrit for hosting, but teams want the code review benefits of Review Board, we have you covered. Review Board can now link up to your Git repositories hosted on Gerrit, letting you post changes for review the same way you would on other services.

This does require the use of a special plugin to enhance Gerrit's API, so see the installation instructions to get started.

Better compatibility with GitLab

We've rewritten our GitLab support to take advantage of the benefits of their latest API. Nested groups and large numbers of repositories are now supported, and edge cases have been addressed. Overall, your GitLab experience should be better now and going forward.

Supporting self-signed SSL certs

If you're using a self-hosted service like GitLab, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Server, or Gerrit, you can now use self-signed SSL certificates without workarounds. You'll be prompted to confirm the certificate when adding the repository, and then you're set.

And lots more

• Custom file-based filters in the diff viewer
• A command for creating new extensions
• New extension template hook points for the review request box
• Many bug fixes, logging additions, and compatibility improvements

For the full list of changes, see the release notes

Django released a new set of security releases that protect against swamping a server when passing certain strings to a few different functions used for building URLs and truncating content. See their announcement for the details on the fixes.

We maintain security-hardened builds of Django 1.6.x, the version series we use for Review Board 2.0 through 3.0. We've put out a new Django 1.6.11.7 release that contains these fixes.

To upgrade to this release, run:

$ pip install -U https://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Django/1.6/Django-1.6.11.7.tar.gz

Or:

$ easy_install -U http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/Django/1.6/Django-1.6.11.7.tar.gz

You can always keep up on the latest Review Board security announcements by subscribing to our Official Announcements mailing list, joining our Subreddit, or following us on Twitter.

For years, companies have come to depend on Power Pack to track and report on the effectiveness of code review in their teams, to review code managed by GitHub Enterprise and Microsoft's Team Foundation Services, and to incorporate document review into their workflows.

Today, we're ready to announce the next generation of Power Pack. On the surface, this brings a number of substantial quality-of-life improvements to Reports and PDF Document Review and new support for AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server. Under the hood, we're in position to bring new collaboration features that we'll be announcing this year.

Let's dig in to what Power Pack 2.0 has to offer.

Revamped Reports

Generating reports for teams has never been easier. Our new UI lets you quickly locate the users and groups you want included in your report and to save those selections for future reports.

Choose a reporting period (such as "This quarter to date," "Last week," or "Since 1 year ago") to instantly see a new report for the period. Bookmark the weekly report in your browser to always keep track of how your team's doing this week.

Download a CSV file for any report to gain better insights using Excel or other tools.

A Polished PDF Experience

PDF document review has been completely redone to better fit in with the look and feel of Review Board 2.5 and 3.0, and to help you see more of your document at once.

Pop open the sidebar to see thumbnails for each page in the document. The active page you're reviewing will be highlighted so you always know where you are and how much you have left to read.

Navigation is smoother. Switching pages or zooming in or out of the document will keep your scroll position steady, so you don't lose your place.

Connect to AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server

With Power Pack, you can now review changes in your Git repositories hosted on AWS CodeCommit and Bitbucket Server. Moving private repositories into CodeCommit or migrating from Bitbucket.org into an in-house Bitbucket Server no longer means changing code review tools.

Get Started

If you're new to Power Pack, why not give it a try? A 30 day free trial covers your whole server, and converts to a free 2-person license once expired. Ready to buy? A full license costs only $8.33 a user a month, for as many or as few users as you choose.

Existing user? Follow the simple upgrade instructions to begin using Power Pack 2.0 today.

Today's release of Review Board 3.0.3 focuses on a series of fixes and improvements for avatars, diffs for comments, extension packaging, and a few other things. The big highlights are with the new avatar upload UI and stability improvements.

Avatars

It's now easier to upload custom avatars. The UI has been completely redone, and gives you a better idea of how your avatar will look. Simply drag-and-drop any image to upload it.

We've also fixed a handful of problems with custom avatar backends, to prevent them from occasionally disappearing or not being used. If you're building custom backends, we're interested in hearing if you're encountering any problems with this release.

Some other things we've fixed

• The Review Request API resource now includes the number of issues pending verification.
• Diffs shown alongside comments work once again under Python 2.7.6 and older.
• Subversion support is no longer broken when using modern versions of Subvertpy.
• Extensions providing LessCSS stylesheets will now package correctly when including stylesheets outside the extension.

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

For over a decade, we've been building Review Board with the goal of making your code, UI, and documentation review process easier, helping you weigh in and spot problems before your customers do.

But we know you're busy — we all are — and there's better uses for your time than checking every change for syntax errors, unused variables, bad imports, style consistency, and other problems that could have been caught ahead of time by code analysis tools.

So we'd like to help you out.

Meet Review Bot.

Review Bot is a self-installed service and extension for Review Board 3.0 that automatically reviews code changes posted for review. It integrates with a handful of popular command line code analysis tools, gathering results and posting reviews for issues found in the code.

You can create as many Review Bot configurations as needed for your organization, running different tools for different repositories or review groups, and customizing the settings for each tool.

Review Bot 1.0 supports the following tools:

• BuildBot "try" — automated builds
• Checkstyle — Static analysis for Java
• Clang Static Analyzer — Static analysis for C, C++, and Objective-C
• Cppcheck — Static analysis for C and C++
• CppLint — Style checker for C and C++ using Google's style guide
• flake8 — Style checker and static analysis for Python
• JSHint — Static analysis for JavaScript
• PMD — Static analysis and duplicate code detector for a wide variety of languages
• pycodestyle — Style checker for Python
• pyflakes — Static analysis for Python

More are coming soon, but you're not limited to what Review Bot ships with. You can also write your own integrations for tools used in your organization using Python.

Get started with Review Bot

Review Bot is ready and eager to start reviewing your code today. To get set up, there are three components you'll need to install:

• A compatible message broker service, such as RabbitMQ or Redis, which tracks automated code review requests
• The Review Bot worker service, which runs any configured tools against your code
• The Review Bot extension for Review Board 3.0

The message broker and Review Bot worker can be installed on the server running Review Board or on a dedicated server. Follow your preferred broker's instructions and the Review Bot installation guide to get everything set up. Please note that some tools may have their own installation requirements as well.

If you have any questions or hit any problems as you get going, you can reach out to us on our community support forum. Priority support for Review Bot is also included as part of a Review Board support contract.

We have a new release of RBTools for you today. Version 0.7.11 brings a number of fixes and improvements for posting reviews and working with Git, Mercurial, Subversion, and Team Foundation Services repositories.

Here are some of the highlights:

• rbt post --diff-only, which used to be specific to Perforce and regressed there recently, now works for all types of repositories.
• Mercurial changes are now posted as Git-style diffs, leading to a better experience on Review Board.
• Crashes running svn info with certain locales when scanning the type of repository will no longer occur.
• Team Foundation Services support should work correctly when Visual Studio 2017 is installed.
• The help output for rbt post --tracking-branch is no longer incomplete and misleading.

The complete list of changes are available in the release notes.

See the RBTools Downloads page for installation instructions for your operating system.

We're working toward a release of RBTools 1.0, with many new features for working with automated code review, intelligently computing tracking branches for Git, landing sets of changes at once, and more. Stay tuned for that, and as always, if you hit any problems, please let us know on our community support forum or bug tracker.

This week's release of Review Board 3.0.2 fixes many bugs in our new features, from avatars and issue verification to automated code review and desktop notifications.

Here are some of the highlights of the release:

• The in-page bubble and browser's desktop notifications have been fixed, letting you see once again when a review request has been updated or has new discussions.

• Diffs with Unicode characters should appear once again alongside comments in reviews.

• Progressively updating automated code reviews no longer stops displaying the diffs for the comments.

• Files from Perforce containing Unicode BOMs should now patch correctly. If you were having this problem, you should also make sure you have a modern P4Python package installed.

• Gravatars once again display properly for users who have mixed-case e-mail addresses.

• Several compatibility regressions with extensions have been fixed.

• The "Download Diff" button should no longer go missing on the diff viewer.

• The User API no longer breaks if an avatar can't be loaded for a user.

There's a handful of other fixes as well. See the release notes for the full list of changes.

The next patch release of Review Board will be a feature enhancement release, focusing on reworked GitLab support (moving to their more stable API version 4), along with new integrations for Asana, Trello, and I Done This. We're aiming for a predicable schedule for releases, so going forward, look for Review Board releases on Tuesdays and RBTools releases on Thursdays.

We have two new Review Board releases for you today!

Review Board 2.5.17 fixes a handful of issues, including:

• Posting changes containing Unicode characters to GitLab via the New Review Request page
• Regressions in showing closed review requests in the search field
• Crashes when getting a user's full name from LDAP when that name didn't include any spaces
• Creating drafts when editing the caption for file attachments
• Showing replies alongside reviews in the user page's list of published reviews

On top of those fixes, Review Board 3.0.1 has a few additional improvements:

• Capability flags have been added in the API's root resource indicating if JSON patching and symlinks in Git diffs are supported, helping clients make smarter decisions
• A newer user permission was added to let that user see invite-only review groups in the API, which is useful for in-house tools
• Avatar backends provided by extensions should no longer disappear

See the 2.5.17 and 3.0.1 release notes for the full list of changes. If you're upgrading to 2.5.17, please follow the installation instructions in the release notes so you don't end up on 3.0.1.

It feels like yesterday that we wrapped up the first release of Review Board 2.5. Surprisingly, it's actually been 2 years, and we've been busy in that time building the next major evolution of Review Board, 3.0.

That version is here, and with it comes new integrations for third-party services, automated code review support, new review capabilities, better discussions, and oh so much more.

It's a big release. Let's take a look at the major features.

Review Board now talks to your other services (like Slack!)

One of the focuses of this release was to help Review Board work with the other tools you use every day. For this, we've developed a new integrations feature that can talk to all sorts of things, like:

• Chat services (Slack, and soon Stride and Mattermost)
• Continuous Integration services (Travis CI and CircleCI)
• Automated code review services (Review Bot, coming soon)
• Project/task management services (Asana and Trello, also coming soon).

You can create as many integration configurations as you need, directing updates for different teams to different Slack channels, or using different tools for different repositories.

More integrations are coming soon, and extension authors can build their own.

Do more with reviews

Your reviews can contain general comments, which aren't tied to any particular file, and are useful for pointing out higher-level issues with a change (missing screenshots, typos in the description, architectural problems, or anything else).

We're introducing optional issue verification, which ensures an issue can't be resolved and the change landed until the reviewer has verified the fix.

Filed a Ship It! accidentally, or maybe it no longer applies? You can now revoke your Ship It! at any time.

Add some flavor to your comments with Emoji shortcodes. These work on any database (unlike Unicode Emojis), and are largely compatible with Slack and GitHub's Emoji sets.

To share a mockup, meme, or other images in your comments, you can drag-and-drop images into text fields. This works with any Markdown-capable text field in the product.

Need to hand off a review request to another developer? Owners of a review request (and administrators) can now re-assign ownership of a review request.

We've improved discussions and searching

New discussions or updates are highlighted in blue, letting you see what's new since you last looked at the page. If you've already seen everything interested in a review or an update, the box will be collapsed by default, letting you focus on what's most important.

Want to share part of a discussion in chat or in an e-mail? You can easily link to reviews, review request updates, and individual comments through the link icon on the side.

Finding review requests has gotten easier with new support for Elasticsearch and on-the-fly search indexing, ensuring that any new changes made to review requests can instantly be found. (Note that Elasticsearch 2.x is currently required.)

New extension capabilities

Working with the API or extensions? Integrating with your own in-house tools? We have some new toys to play with:

• Review Board now works as an OAuth2 Provider, letting your users easily connect your service to their account in a safe way
• Custom avatar backends for using your company's existing photo database instead of Gravatar.com.
• New fine-grained control for modifying extra_data in the API, and controlling access to data.
• A better way of adding customs fields, with built-in options for drop-downs, checkboxes, date fields, and more.

Did we mention it's a big release?

Whew, that's a lot, and doesn't even cover all the new features in the release.

Ready to get going with Review Board 3.0? We recommend installing on a test server first with a copy of your database, just to make sure it works for you.

Please let us know how Review Board 3.0 works for you, or what you're most excited about. You can also find us on Reddit at /r/reviewboard.

We've just wrapped up what should be the final release candidate for Review Board 3.0. This release polishes up some of the new features and visuals, improves performance throughout the product, enhances the API's capabilities, and fixes a handful of bugs and regressions.

Let's dig in.

Smarter Collapsing of Review and Change Boxes

One of the major goals of Review Board 3.0 is to help you better follow along with any changes and discussions on review requests. To help with that, we've improved when boxes on the review request page start out collapsed.

If there's a new review or update to a review request, a new reply, an issue that needs to be resolved, or pending status updates, the box will be expanded, but if not, it will be collapsed. This really helps to see what's most important when working with large review requests.

Better API Support for JSON in extra_data

Most resources in the REST API provide a special field extra_data, which stores arbitrary JSON data that clients can write to and read from. Until now, clients could only store simple keys and values, and couldn't easily work with structured JSON content.

The API now supports using JSON Patches and JSON Merge Patches to modify extra_data, allowing for complex JSON structures to be stored, modified, and returned.

Better High-DPI Support

Screens are getting better all the time. MacBook Pro "Retina" displays arrived in 2012, and even higher-DPI screens have become more common since. Review Board has shipped artwork for "2x" DPI displays for years, but now we support "3x" and higher, with improved loading and no more transitions from low-resolution to high-resolution graphics. No matter what your display, Review Board will be nice and crisp.

And Loads More

This release is filled with polish and fixes for performance and stability. See the release notes for the complete list of changes, along with installation instructions.

We plan to ship the final 3.0 release this month, based on your feedback from this release. We expect that this will be the final release candidate, and that not much will change for the final 3.0 release, so now's the time to test and send us your feedback.