Month: September 2014

Auto-closing review requests when pushing changes

Christian Hammond

We’ve launched a new feature today for simplifying your code review workflow.

If you’re using GitHub, Bitbucket, or Google Code, RBCommons can now automatically close your review requests when you push your commits to your repository, making use of the service’s “post-commit” hooks. You’ll no longer need to click Close -> Submitted, saving time and keeping your dashboard clean.

 

Usage is simple

Once you’re set up (and we’ll go into that in a minute), all you need to do is include the following in your commit message:

Reviewed at https://rbcommons.com/s/<your-team>/r/<id>/

Or:

Review Request #<id>

Just commit, and your review request will be automatically closed, along with a message containing the commit revision and which branch it was committed to.

 

Setting this up

Setup depends on which service you’re using for your repositories, but we’ve worked to make it pretty simple.

We’ve added some new buttons to your Team Administration -> Repositories page. You’ll see a “Hooks” button next to any supported repository. Click that, and you’ll see instructions on turning this feature on for your repository. In just seconds, your repository will be set up!

This feature is still new, but has been undergoing testing for several weeks. If you hit any snags, let us know and we’ll help get you going.

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RBCommons and this week’s security news

Christian Hammond

This has been an interesting week on the Internet, security-wise. A vulnerability in the Bash shell (named “Shellshock”) was announced that allows remote execution of code on unpatched servers with certain configurations. Separately, an undisclosed vulnerability in Xen forced AWS and Rackspace to announce mandatory reboots of many of their customers’ servers. (See Amazon’s announcement and Rackspace’s announcement for more details.)

We’d like to give an overview of how all this is affecting RBCommons and, in turn, you.

We keep a close eye on all security updates available for the software and libraries we use, and are quick to patch our servers as fixes roll out. We’ve also performed many tests to ensure that malicious Shellshock HTTP requests do not impact us. Your data is safe.

Some of the services we use were affected by the mandatory AWS and Rackspace reboots. Earlier today, our mail provider, Mailgun, was temporarily down during the outage, which may have resulted in missing or delayed e-mails for those working on Sunday.

We’ve had a few rare DNS lookup failures, resulting in errors when visiting pages or otherwise interacting with RBCommons. There have only been four so far, and are temporary. If you see a random error loading a page, please just try again. We know this failure has affected a number of other AWS customers as well.

Tonight at 11PM PST, Amazon is scheduling some of our servers for a 6 hour maintenance window. This isn’t the first set of our servers to have undergone the mandatory maintenance, and we aren’t expecting any interruption to RBCommons during this time. However, we may be running at reduced capacity for about 20-30 minutes. We will be monitoring things closely.

If you are repeatedly hitting problems with RBCommons, please contact us!

We’ll post further updates if there’s anything to report.

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Announcing unlimited repositories, PDF document review, and 30-day trials!

Christian Hammond

We’re very happy to announce some exciting improvements to the plans offered on RBCommons.

 

Unlimited repositories!

We’ve removed the restrictions on the number of repositories your team can set up. You can now add as many repositories s you need without hitting a limit, and at no additional cost. Add all your Git repositories, your forks, open source projects you contribute to, or whatever you like.

This applies to all plans from Starter to Enterprise. If you’re running on the old Micro 2012 or Small 2012 plans, you’ll need to upgrade in order to add unlimited repositories.

 

Upload your PDFs for review

We’ve also introduced support for reviewing PDF documents. Simply drag-and-drop a PDF file into your review request and wait for the PDF to be processed. Reviewers will be able to read through the PDF and comment on any section, just like they can already do with code and images today.

This feature is available on Medium and higher plans. If you’re on a smaller plan, you can upgrade to take advantage of PDF review by changing your plan in your Team Administration page. If you’re interested in trying out PDF review first, contact us and we will temporarily enable it for your team.

 

More time to try RBCommons

For the new teams out there, we’ve increased our trial period from 14 days to 30. This should give you more time to get set up and comfortable with RBCommons.

If you already have a trial subscription, we’ve already gone back and increased your trial to 30 days. You should have received an e-mail from us already. If not, please let us know.

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