third-party.md

Using third-party platforms via bridges

This page provides an overview of how to use bridges to sync issues to and from third-party platforms.

Overview

Bridges within git-bug are bi-directional, incremental, and speedy gateways to third-party platforms. Configuring a bridge allows you to push and pull issues to and from a third party platform.

This expands the utility and function of git-bug: because issues are just objects in your git repository, you can import issues from a bridge to work on them in bulk, offline, in your preferred environment, at your own pace. When you're ready to push your issues back to the external platform again, you'll be able to synchronize the changes you made with one simple command.

Bridge workflow

This has several benefits:

  • works offline, including edition
  • browsing is pretty much instant
  • you get to choose the UI you prefer between CLI, interactive TUI or in your browser with the WEBUI
  • you have a near-complete archive of issues locally, embedded in your git repository, in case the external platform becomes inaccessible
  • you are free to move to another platform -- your issues follow wherever your repo goes!

Supported bridges

We support a number of bridges:

  • Jira
  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • Launchpad

For a full list of the features enabled for each bridge, see the feature matrix.

Getting started

  1. From within a git repository, run git bug bridge new to start the configuration wizard
  2. Choose the type of bridge you want to configure, e.g. github
  3. Type a name for the bridge configuration. As you can configure multiple bridges, this name will allow you to choose when there is an ambiguity.
  4. If you already have a repository created on the external platform, and your local git repository has that as a remote, the configuration wizard will automatically detect the URL. Otherwise, please ensure you enter the appropriate URL for the remote project: something like https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
  5. Create an access token. You can either use the interactive token creation, enter it on your own token, or use an existing token if you already have one

That's it! Once you've completed the wizard, you'll have successfully configured a bridge.

Interacting with the bridge

To push issues out to the bridge, run:

git bug bridge push [NAME]

To pull and integrate updates for issues from the bridge:

git bug bridge pull [NAME]

[!TIP] See the CLI documentation for more information on the command line arguments and options.

The command line is primarily meant for programmatic usage or to interface with git-bug with scripts or other tools. For day to day usage, we recommend taking a look at the supported interfaces, which include a robust TUI and an in-progress Web UI.

See more