Kiln: now with pre-baked Web Hooks for your enjoyment
March 28th, 2011 by Benjamin Pollack
When we initially added Web Hooks to Kiln, we were excited: they made integrating Kiln with the outside world trivial. And we’ve seen a lot of uses of Web Hooks: we’ve used them internally to power our continuous integration system, Mortar, and to integrate pushes into HipChat to keep our teams aware of what’s going on in our repositories. And we’ve heard of other customers getting their own CI systems integrated, and getting integrated with their own chat systems. And some of our customers who had continuous integration systems or corporate chat environments used Web Hooks to integrate Kiln into…
…er, wait. Something’s not right here. I seem to be repeating myself and then saying the same thing again.
While Web Hooks’ flexibility is great, and we’ve used them for some novel things in the past (such as covering a dev’s entire screen with Growl-powered push notifications), most Kiln users just want a quick way to tie Kiln into their existing infrastructure; the flexibility of Web Hooks is overkill for that.
So we’re proud to introduce prefabricated Web Hooks in Kiln for Campfire, HipChat, TeamCity, and Pivotal Tracker.
Team Chat
The first two are very obvious: Kiln can post updates on what’s going on with your source code right into your chat environment, making it really easy to keep your support staff up-to-date on what you’re up to.
Continuous Integration
Next up, a lot of our users wanted integration with a continuous integration system, and by “a continuous integration system”, most of our customers meant “TeamCity”. So now, Kiln can talk directly to TeamCity: just give it your TeamCity URL, and Kiln will automatically let you choose which build configuration to notify and for which repositories. Easy as pie.
Pivotal Tracker
Finally, one of the common questions we get is, “Can I use Kiln without FogBugz?” The answer has always been “yes,” but a lot of people are really asking, “Can I integrate Kiln with other bug trackers?” As of now, the answer is yes: Kiln now directly supports Pivotal Tracker.
Just tell Kiln your Pivotal API token, then use your normal Pivotal commit syntax, and Kiln will add links to your changesets to the relevant stories.
These are just the first couple baked-in web hooks we’re providing. We’d love to hear about any others you’d like us to add. Simply let us know at our StackExchange.
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