Integration with BeanStalk – Hosted Subversion
Monday, April 13th, 2009
Since early on at TeamSupport, we’ve been using a great hosted Subversion (SVN) platform called BeanStalk to host our code repository.
If you’re not a developer, this probably won’t make much sense to you, but I’ll give it a shot: Subversion, or SVN, is a widely used source control system. It lets develops check in (or “commit”) their code, see changes from previous versions, roll back to another version, etc. A source control system is critically important for developing software, and SVN is a great tool. Here’s a Wikipedia article about Subversion, and another about version control in general.
Some companies install SVN locally which is a fine option, but since we’re a SaaS company we wanted a hosted provider for a number of reasons: The two primary reasons were simplicity and redundancy. BeanStalk is wonderfully simple to set up and they are religious about backing up and protecting our code, so they were a perfect fit for us.
Needless to say, we’ve been happy users of BeanStalk and when it came time to do some integration work with source repositories we wanted to do BeanStalk first. This solved a very real problem for us (integrating our source control with our bug tracking system), and also let us be our own beta testers.
We contacted BeanStalk and they were very accommodating to work with, and we quickly put together a very slick integration.
Once you have linked TeamSupport and BeanStalk (you can read about the technical stuff in our help file), whenever a developer “commits” a new version of code he will put the version number and the specific tickets which are addressed in the commit description.
That causes BeanStalk to automatically send us a message and we then add an action to each one of the tickets modified with the commit information.
One of the neatest things is that there is a link in the action to BeanStalk which lets developers look at that particular code revision and see the actual lines of code which were changed. Pretty powerful stuff!
We have been using this integration ourselves for our various applications and have found it very useful – We hope you to do! We would also appreciate any feedback about how we could improve the integration.
