Gertty is a console-based interface to the Gerrit Code Review system.
As compared to the web interface, the main advantages are:
- Workflow -- the interface is designed to support a workflow similar to reading network news or mail. In particular, it is designed to deal with a large number of review requests across a large number of projects.
- Offline Use -- Gertty syncs information about changes in subscribed projects to a local database and local git repos. All review operations are performed against that database and then synced back to Gerrit.
- Speed -- user actions modify locally cached content and need not wait for server interaction.
- Convenience -- because Gertty downloads all changes to local git repos, a single command instructs it to checkout a change into that repo for detailed examination or testing of larger changes.
Gertty is packaged in Debian sid/testing. You can install it with:
apt-get install gertty
Gertty is packaged starting in Fedora 21. You can install it with:
yum install python-gertty
When installing from source, it is recommended (but not required) to install Gertty in a virtualenv. To set one up:
virtualenv gertty-env source gertty-env/bin/activate
To install the latest version from the cheeseshop:
pip install gertty
To install from a git checkout:
pip install .
Gertty uses a YAML based configuration file that it looks for at
~/.gertty.yaml
. Several sample configuration files are included.
You can find them in the examples/ directory of the
source distribution
or the share/gertty/examples directory after installation.
Select one of the sample config files, copy it to ~/.gertty.yaml and
edit as necessary. Search for CHANGEME
to find parameters that
need to be supplied. The sample config files are as follows:
- minimal-gertty.yaml
- Only contains the parameters required for Gertty to actually run.
- reference-gertty.yaml
- An exhaustive list of all supported options with examples.
- openstack-gertty.yaml
- A configuration designed for use with OpenStack's installation of Gerrit.
- googlesource-gertty.yaml
- A configuration designed for use with installations of Gerrit running on googlesource.com.
You will need your Gerrit password which you can generate or retrieve
by navigating to Settings
, then HTTP Password
.
Gertty uses local git repositories to perform much of its work. These
can be the same git repositories that you use when developing a
project. Gertty will not alter the working directory or index unless
you request it to (and even then, the usual git safeguards against
accidentally losing work remain in place). You will need to supply
the name of a directory where Gertty will find or clone git
repositories for your projects as the git-root
parameter.
The config file is designed to support multiple Gerrit instances. The first one is used by default, but others can be specified by supplying the name on the command line.
After installing Gertty, you should be able to run it by invoking
gertty
. If you installed it in a virtualenv, you can invoke it
without activating the virtualenv with /path/to/venv/bin/gertty
which you may wish to add to your shell aliases. Use gertty
--help
to see a list of command line options available.
Once Gertty is running, you will need to start by subscribing to some projects. Use 'L' to list all of the projects and then 's' to subscribe to the ones you are interested in. Hit 'L' again to shrink the list to your subscribed projects.
In general, pressing the F1 key will show help text on any screen, and ESC will take you to the previous screen.
Gertty works seamlessly offline or online. All of the actions that it
performs are first recorded in a local database (in ~/.gertty.db
by default), and are then transmitted to Gerrit. If Gertty is unable
to contact Gerrit for any reason, it will continue to operate against
the local database, and once it re-establishes contact, it will
process any pending changes.
The status bar at the top of the screen displays the current number of outstanding tasks that Gertty must perform in order to be fully up to date. Some of these tasks are more complicated than others, and some of them will end up creating new tasks (for instance, one task may be to search for new changes in a project which will then produce 5 new tasks if there are 5 new changes). This will explain why the number of tasks displayed in the status bar sometimes changes rapidly.
If Gertty is offline, it will so indicate in the status bar. It will retry requests if needed, and will switch between offline and online mode automatically.
If Gertty encounters an error, this will also be indicated in the status bar. You may wish to examine ~/.gertty.log to see what the error was. In many cases, Gertty can continue after encountering an error. The error flag will be cleared when you leave the current screen.
To select text (e.g., to copy to the clipboard), hold Shift while selecting the text.
For information on how to contribute to Gertty, please see the contents of the CONTRIBUTING.rst file.