Linking Subversion Commits to Pivotal Tracker on Windows using Powershell

My team at work now keep our entire lives in PivotalTracker, and rather like it. We recently linked it to our GitHub repository using the built-in PivotalTracker integration that’s provided by GitHub, which worked really nicely. Thing is, we’re still in the process of migrating our codebase to GitHub – there’s lots of older projects with TeamCity jobs still linked to our in-house Subversion repo – and I wanted to add a similar facility for our projects that are still in Subversion.

This is all based on the Source Control Management Post-Commit Hook Integration feature in the Pivotal Tracker API, and getting it working required two scripts.

post-commit.bat – this is the standard batch file used by Subversion on Windows to run code after a successful commit. Subversion runs this automatically, and passes in two command-line arguments – the (local) path of the repository that accepted the commit, and the revision number created by that commit. Ours now looks like this:

@echo off
$ps = %SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
$ps Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
$ps -command "D:\svn\data\repositories\projects\hooks\post-commit.ps1" -repopath %1 -revision %2

A couple of things to notice. First, we’re running the powershell Set-ExecutionPolicy as part of the script. This is brute force and there’s probably a nicer way of doing it, but since the Powershell script runs as the user who owns the Subversion server process, and that user doesn’t have interactive logon rights, I couldn’t see a quicker way of getting that script to run reliably. Ah, Powershell security, how we love you.

Second – we’re passing the two command-line arguments into the powershell script as named parameters. Subversion will call the batch file as:

post-commit.bat D:\svn\data\repositories\projects 12345

and we’re translating that into

powershell.exe –command post-commit.ps1 –repopath D:\svn\data\repositories\projects –revision 12345

The bit that actually does the heavy lifting is post-commit.ps1

param([string]$repopath, [string]$revision)   

$svnlook = "C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\svnlook.exe"

$message = & "$svnlook" log $repopath -r $revision | Out-String

if ($message -match "#\d\d\d\d\d\d\d\d") {
    $reponame = Split-Path $repopath –leaf
    $author = & "$svnlook" author $repopath -r $revision | Out-String
   
    # Grab a reference to System.Web so we can HtmlEncode things.
    Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Web
    $author = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode($author)
    $message = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode($message)

    # We run ViewCV on our Subversion server to browse code via the web. Tweak this to suit,
    # or remove the <url></url> element from the XML completely.
    $url = "http://subversion.mycompany.com/viewvc/$reponame`?view=revision&revision=$revision"

    $headers = @{"X-TrackerToken" = "put your Pivotal Tracker API Token Here"}
    # This is Powershell's "here-string" syntax for multiline string literals.
    $body = @"

<source_commit>
    <message>$message</message>
    <author>$author</author>
    <commit_id>$revision</commit_id>
    <url>$url</url>
</source_commit>
"@

    $r = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri http://www.pivotaltracker.com/services/v3/source_commits -ContentType "application/xml" -Method POST -Headers $headers -Body $body

    Write-Host $r
} else {
    # if nothing in the commit message matched the #12345678 syntax, then don’t bother calling the API.
}

To test it, first run the Powershell script directly from your command line. Say you’ve just committed revision 12345 to the “projects” repository, remembering to include [#12345678] in your commit comment where 12345678 is the PivotalTracker story ID.

PS D:\svn\data\repositories\projects\hooks> ./post-commit.ps1 –repopath D:\svn\data\repositories\projects –revision 12345

Your commit comment should appear in the story history within a few seconds.

Now check the batch file harness can run your Powershell properly – see the note below about revisions:

D:\svn\data\repositories\projects\hooks> post-commit.bat D:\svn\data\repositories\projects 12346

If that works, the whole kaboodle should work. A couple of caveats to watch out for:

1. If your post-commit hook fails, your Subversion client will give you something cryptic about “Commit failed: MERGE … 200 OK” – which is not particularly transparent. Best to get things working on the command line first before testing via Subversion itself.
2. I couldn’t get the same commit to produce multiple Pivotal tickets – when I was testing it, I had to create a fresh commit for each test run of the integration hook. This is possibly just Pivotal automatically de-duplicating identical stories – but worth knowing for test purposes