Pickler

Synchronize user stories in Pivotal Tracker with Cucumber features.

If you aren’t using Cucumber, you can still use pickler as a Pivotal Tracker command line client, provided you humor it with a features/ directory containing a tracker.yml file.

Getting started

gem install tpope-pickler --source=http://gems.github.com
echo "api_token: ..."  > ~/.tracker.yml
echo "username: ..."  > ~/.tracker.yml
echo "project_id: ..." > ~/my/app/features/tracker.yml
echo "ssl: [true|false]" >> ~/my/app/features/tracker.yml
pickler --help

“ssl” defaults to false if not configured in the yml file. “username” is the keyword to use in ‘todo’ search, your name or initials.

For details about the Pivotal Tracker API, including where to find your API token and project id, see www.pivotaltracker.com/help/api .

The pull and push commands map the story’s name into the “Feature: …” line and the story’s description with an additional two space indent into the feature’s body. Keep this in mind when entering stories into Pivotal Tracker.

Writing stories

In order for pickler to pick up your stories from tracker, they need to meet the following criteria:

  • They must be wellformed cucumber stories

  • They must contain the word ‘Scenario’ (or the equivalent in your localized stories)

  • Their status must be set to ‘started’ at least

Usage

pickler pull

Download all well formed stories to the features/ directory.

pickler push

Upload all features with a tracker url in a comment on the first line.

pickler search <query>

List all stories matching the given query.

pickler start <story>

Pull a given feature and change its state to started.

pickler finish <story>

Push a given feature and change its state to finished.

pickler todo

List all stories assigned to your username.

pickler bug Something

Opensi a bug with “Something” as title. Try “chore” too.

pickler bug

If you don`t provide a title, pickler will open your $EDITOR.

pickler --help

Full list of commands.

pickler <command> --help

Further help for a given command.

piv <command>

Alias for your fingers sake.

Disclaimer

No warranties, expressed or implied.

Notably, the push and pull commands are quite happy to blindly clobber features if so instructed. Pivotal Tracker has a history to recover things server side.