Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Dev Tools – Third Quarter 2015

December 3, 2015
#Bitbucket#News
14 min

Users and admins of Bitbucket Cloud, Bitbucket Server (Stash) and Bamboo, today’s post is for you. In April and July we published posts about top 5 new add-ons for Bitbucket Server (Stash) of the first and second quarters of 2015. Continuing that series, here’s the article highlighting some of the best new add-ons for Dev Tools of the third quarter.

Speaking about new tools for Bitbucket Cloud, we’ve made one of our most popular add-ons Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket Server available for Bitbucket Cloud. If you haven’t heard about it before, this plugin allows to visualize the statistics of contributions made in repositories and provides illustrative charts and graphs for analysis, reporting and planning. If it sounds interesting and useful, give it a try and we’d love to hear your feedback. At the moment Awesome Graphs for Bitbucket Cloud has less features than the Server version as it’s new. But there is a lot to come and you can vote for features that you’d like to have in the add-on.

As well, for those of you who are also using Confluence and JIRA, here are two recent posts to check out:

Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Third Quarter 2015

Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian JIRA – Third Quarter 2015

Top 5 new add-ons for Dev Tools from those that had their first release during July – September 2015:

Below is a brief description of these tools for you to get a general idea about what they do and decide if you’d like to evaluate them.

1. Websites for Bitbucket

Websites for Bitbucket is the add-on for Bitbucket Cloud. It allows you to host your Bitbucket repository as a static HTML website, so you can easily manage and deploy your HTML website directly from Bitbucket Cloud. You just edit code, push changes and your site is updated automatically. To get going, you need to:

  • after installing the add-on, select an existing HTML repository or fork one of the suggested templates. Alternatively, you can go to the ‘Aerobatic Hosting’ page of the repository you want to deploy
  • if you selected an existing repository, provide website name, deployment branch and directory. Ready to deploy? Mark ‘Yes, deploy my site now!’. If you do not select this option, Aerobatic will create your website but it will not be deployed until you push your code
  • once your website is live, you can edit your code, push changes and a new version of your site goes live automatically.

You can also deploy multiple versions of a website, each with its own unique URL.

The add-on comes with CDN, Custom Domains, SSL, API Proxy, HTTP Basic AuthCustom Error Pages.

Pricing: At the moment Websites for Bitbucket is free for hosting up to two repositories with Aerobatic. If you have more than 2 repositories, you should upgrade to one of the paid plansTry it

2. Bitbucket Pull Request Auto Reviewers

Bitbucket Pull Request Auto Reviewers makes it possible to have pull requests reviewers automatically assigned to pull requests so that you can be sure the right people will always review the quality of the code that’s specified in the pull request.

Work out and commit simple reviewer assignment rules directly in your repository.

And when creating a pull request, leave the Reviewers field blank, reviewers will be assigned automatically based on the defined rules.

Pricing: Right now Bitbucket Pull Request Auto Reviewers is free. Try it

3. Platform.sh PHP PaaS For Bitbucket

Platform.sh PHP PaaS For Bitbucket provides Bitbucket Cloud integration with Platform.sh, which is a cloud continuous integration and hosting of PHP websites solution that allows to create an unlimited number of environments for testing and development tasks on the fly and optimizes your development-to-production workflow. Every feature can be tested in isolation on a dedicated automatically generated staging server, as you have a live testenvironment and a separate URL for every Git branch you create.

Users can interact with their projects and manage environments with web interface or CLI. All environments of a certain project are listed on the left sidebar.

Each Platform.sh project consists of one or more applications and zero or more services. Services are common for the whole project but you can configure for each application in its .platform.app.yaml file how this service will be called, and whether or not it should be available. So your testing or development environments can be different from your live production environment.

With this add-on  you can manage your Platform.sh environments directly from a Bitbucket Cloud repository.

With this add-on it is possible to:

  • generate a new environment when creating a branch or opening a pull request in Bitbucket
  • rebuild an environment when pushing new code to Bitbucket Cloud
  • delete an environment when merging a pull request

To get started, after installing the add-on, you should connect your Bitbucket repository to Platform.sh in the ‘Platform.sh integration’ section of the repository settings. Then you need to:

  • create a new project or connect to an existing Platform.sh project
  • configure your application and services
  • start pushing code to your Bitbucket Cloud repository and see changes automatically deployed on Platform.sh

You can involve an unlimited number of contributors by managing users access on your project.

It is also possible to:

  • map a domain and add your SSH key
  • create a snapshot for an environment, so that it could be restored
  • integrate with any external system and workflow (Drupal, Symfony, WP, Magento, Prestashop, etc.) thanks to a full REST API and a scriptable CLI

Pricing: Platform.sh pricing is available here. Platform.sh PHP PaaS For Bitbucket is free. Try it

4. Issue Creator for Bitbucket Server

Issue Creator for Bitbucket Server helps Bitbucket Server users save some time as it allows to create JIRA issues for Bitbucket Server commit comments, pull request comments and tasks fast and easy.

Creating JIRA issues for pull request comments

To create an issue from a pull request comment, click the “Create JIRA issue” button in comment actions options. In the pop-up dialog, JIRA project, assignee, reporter, summary and description are filled in automatically for your convenience.

You can choose one of ther options:

  • create JIRA issue for the Bitbucket Server comment and JIRA sub-tasks for all open Bitbucket Server tasks under it
  • JIRA issues for all open Bitbucket Server tasks under this Bitbucket Server comment

There is also an option to set Bitbucket Server tasks to resolved when creating JIRA issues.

When you press ‘Create’, JIRA issues for the comment and its tasks will be created.

Creating JIRA issues for leftover pull request tasks

To create issues for all open tasks that are left in a pull request, click the ‘Create JIRA issues’ button on the top right.

You will see the same pop-up dialogue as the one you have when creating a JIRA issue from pull requests comments.

Create JIRA issue for a commit comment

You can create JIRA issues from commit comments in the way similar to creating issues from pull requests comments. Commit comments cannot have tasks in Bitbucket Server, so in the pop-up dialogue there is no option to create sub-tasks. However you can create sub-tasks while viewing a newly created issue in JIRA.

Pricing: A commercial license for Issue Creator for Bitbucket Server costs 25$ for 25 users; 50$ for 50 users 100$ for 100 users. Try it

5. Variable Extractor Tasks for Bamboo

Using Variable Extractor Tasks for Bamboo you can extract result variables for your Bamboo build plan from text and XML files in your project.

The add-on provides two new build tasks for your build plan:

  • Text Variable Extractor
  • XML Variable Extractor

While configuring settings for Text or XML Variable Extractor, you can:

  • define a file that should be searched inside the build directory for a configuration value
  • specify an expression which should be searched for in a given file (Regular Expression for Text Variable Extractor and XPath Expression for XML Variable Extractor)
  • add Bamboo variable name where the result should be stored in your job

If extraction fails (an expression or a file is not found), you can decide if you want the build to fail or use a default value.

The extracted value (e.g. version numbers) can be used in later build step or deployment plan and name your releases according to the extracted version value.

Pricing: Variable Extractor Tasks for Bamboo is free. Try

If you get any questions, feel free to ask them in comments below or email me at kkolina@stiltsoft.com.

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