Display commit history on external website

Question

I would like to display commit history to my webservice/-site editors. They don't have access to the bitbucket repository.

Is it possible to display the commit history directly on Rails operated website or through for example the wiki that is part of bitbucket setup?

Thanks for any help on this topic!

Daniil Penkin · Answer

I can think of few ways to achieve something like this:

* use Slack integration which can be configured to send notifications to a channel when a commit is pushed, pull request is merged, etc.
* generate a CHANGELOG file and publish it somehow (might be just a page on your webapp). There're tools to automate this based on commit messages – this will require to keep specific format of the commit messages.
* as I mentioned above, create a simple Connect app that would listen to commit webhooks and publish the metadata somewhere.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Daniil

Luolaputki · Answer

Hi Daniil and thanks for the quick reply.

The purpose of this question is that I would like to publish the commit comments/description. Not the actual change or the code since the editors are not interested on that but are interested when I change the code to know in high level based on the commit comments what have I changed.

I'm looking for some easy/quick solution for this if there are any. The next step would be just to update our wiki page manually, but I'm bit too lazy for that ;)

Of course the are tools like Jira that could be used in this context so evey commit would be connected to some ticket etc. but since we are operating qith quite small amout of resources (manpower and money) we are at this point trying to find some other ways to handle this.

Cheers,

Tommi

Daniil Penkin · Answer

Hello  @Luolaputki,

Thanks for reaching out.

There's no way to reflect commit history through wiki or any other means in the repository itself.

The only way to make a repository visible (including commit history) to someone without Bitbucket account is to make that repository public. This will obviously allow anyone on the Internet see your repository, which is probably not what you want.

If your code isn't a secret while the metadata is (pull requests, comments, etc.), you can make a fork of your repository and make it public. Anyone on the Internet will be able to browse that fork, but no one will have access to the metadata in the main repository. You will only need to sync the fork with the upstream from time to time to fetch new changes.

By the way, what exactly do you mean by commit history? A list of commits or a way to browse every change?

Is it possible to display the commit history directly on Rails operated website?

If you clone the repo in question to some place available to your Rails app, it can do whatever it wants with that copy :)

The more sophisticated way might be to build a Connect App which will be able to read you repository via API, and within that app implement the logic you need around making commit history accessible by someone without Bitbucket account. Obviously, it is up to you how you  implement and configure authentication mechanism (e.g. so that only right people can see what they are allowed to see).

If you elaborate on your desired use case, I might be able to suggest something less generic :)

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,
Daniil