Bandying tickets from RT to GitHub Issues

Update: An updated script for v3 of the GitHub API can be found in my environment repo. An alternate version by David Golden also exists.

Don’t you hate it when you’re given the choice between a few tools, and all of them are real nifty, but are missing a (different) key feature?

Today, I had that tantalizing problem with bug tracking systems. As the new maintainer of DBD::Oracle, I’m trying to wrap my head around the 32 tickets currently open against it. Many tickets are platform-dependent, or appear for a specific version of Oracle. It would be fantastic to be able to tag the different tickets with those details, but alas CPAN’s RT doesn’t have tags. Booh!

But… GitHub Issues have tags. Wonderful. Except that… as of now, GitHub Issues doesn’t support priorities. Hiss!

So it all boils down to what do I want most (or, on the flip side, what I can live without), priorities or tags? Another factor, entropy, will probably make me keep RT as the official bug tracking system. But, migrating or not, I would still like to have a copy of my RT tickets on GitHub, just so that I can use the tags, and integrate the tickets more tightly with the development flow.

Fortunately, with the help of RT::Client::REST and Net::GitHub, it’s quite easy to export our tickets.

First, we create our github and rt clients:

use RT::Client::REST;
use RT::Client::REST::Ticket;

use Net::GitHub::V2::Issues;

my $github_user       = 'yanick';
my $github_token      = 'deadbeef';
my $github_repo_owner = 'yanick';
my $github_repo       = 'DBD-Oracle';

my $rt_user     = 'pythian';
my $rt_password = 'secret';
my $rt_dist     = 'DBD-Oracle';

my $gh = Net::GitHub::V2::Issues->new(
    owner => $github_repo_owner,
    repo  => $github_repo,
    login => $github_user,
    token => $github_token,
);

my $rt = RT::Client::REST->new( server => 'https://rt.cpan.org/' );
$rt->login(
    username => $rt_user,
    password => $rt_password
);

We don’t want to migrate tickets over and over again, so we look at our github tickets, and see if they relate to rt tickets. To keep things simple, I’ll make sure that tickets coming from RT contain the ticker number in their title.

# see which tickets we already have on the github side
my @gh_issues =
  map { /(rt(d+))/ } 
  map { $_->{title} }    
      @{ $gh->list('open') || [] };

say join ' ', 'github issues:', @gh_issues;

After that, we query RT for all the active tickets, and try to export them:

export_ticket( $_ ) for $rt->search(
    type  => 'ticket',
    query => qq{
        Queue = '$rt_dist' 
        and
        ( Status = 'new' or Status = 'open' )
    },
);

The export function is pretty simple. As mentioned before, we first check that the ticket doesn’t already exist on the github side:

sub export_ticket {
    my $id = shift;

    say "ticket $id";

    return say "already on github" if $id ~~ @gh_issues;

If it doesn’t, we import the main ticket information, plus the description of the ticket (contained in its first transaction):

# get the information from RT
my $ticket = RT::Client::REST::Ticket->new(
    rt => $rt,
    id => $id,
);
$ticket->retrieve;

# we just want the first transaction, which
# has the original ticket description
my $desc = $ticket->transactions->get_iterator->()->content;

Finally, we create the github issue with those pieces of data:

    # create the github ticket
    my $gh_ticket = $gh->open( $ticket->subject . ' (rt' . $_ . ')',
        "https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=$_\n\n" . $desc );

    # and assign it the label 'rt'
    $gh->add_label( $gh_ticket->{number} => 'rt', );
}

The full script is available here.

And that’s all there is to it. It’s simple, but it gets the job done.