p4twitter

a Perforce trigger that "tweets" changelist commits

Version:	1.0 (2009-03-30)
Created by:	Stefan van As

What is Perforce?

Perforce is a version control system.

What is p4twitter?

p4twitter is a command-line utility that will send (aka tweet) your Perforce changelist descriptions to Twitter. Because tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length, Twitter is an excellent channel to publish your changelists to your target audience.

What operating systems do you support?

p4twitter is Windows-only.

What are the p4twitter command-line parameters?

p4twitter expects the following command-line parameters:

`username`	your Twitter username
`password`	your Twitter password
`p4user`	your Perforce username (probably Administrator)
`p4passwd`	your Perforce password (probably the Administrator password)

In addition to the above, p4twitter expects a changelist command-line parameter, but this is provided by the Perforce server itself via the %changelist% variable:

p4twitter changelist=%changelist%

Who uses p4twitter?

TopStyle 4 is a Twitter user that is running p4twitter to "tweet" about changelist commits automatically. Basically, it comes down to this: every time a bug is fixed (or a new feature has been added), and this bugfix is committed to Perforce, a new tweet is published automatically, allowing the target audience to stay on top of the project on a daily basis.

How do I install p4twitter?

1. Unzip p4twitter.zip to your Perforce server directory (probably C:\Program Files\Perforce)

2. Create a new Perforce trigger (click here for more info on Perforce triggers).

We're not going to repeat everything about Perforce triggers here, but you create a Perforce trigger via the p4 triggers command. Here's an example:

p4twitter change-commit //depot/... "p4twitter.exe username=topstyle4 password=******** p4user=Administrator p4passwd=******** changelist=%changelist%"

This example above breaks down to this:

`p4twitter`	the name of the trigger.
`change-commit`	trigger type. `change-commit` is a changelist submission trigger that will execute after changelist commit.
`//depot/...`	a file pattern in depot syntax. when a user submits a changelist that contains any files that match this file pattern, this trigger is executed.
`"p4twitter.exe"`	the command for the Perforce server to run. must be quoted. please make sure to include all the command-line parameters and the `%changelist%` variable.

Note: p4twitter will ALWAYS return an exit status of 0 (zero), even if sending the changelist description to Twitter fails for whatever reason (in other words: changelist submission should always succeed regardless of the p4twitter result).

Is p4twitter free?

Yes, p4twitter is freeware but unsupported. Use at your own risc.