Pivotal Tracker Activity Webhook Forwarder

A simple Rack app that allows you to use any number of Activity Web Hooks on your Pivotal Tracker projects by acting as an endpoint to them and forwarding the calls from Tracker to any number of configurable other urls

In a new app folder, add those files:

A Gemfile containing:

source :rubygems
gem 'tracker-hook-forwarder'

A config.ru containing:

require 'bundler/setup'
require 'tracker-hook-forwarder'

forward 'project_a', 'https://your.endpoint.com/for/tracker'
forward 'project_a', 'https://someother.com/tracker?token=1234'

forward 'project_b', 'https://someother.com/tracker?token=1234'    

run TrackerHookForwarder

Deploy the application using a rack-compatible web server (or Heroku, see section below), then configure your individual Pivotal Tracker projects to post Activity Web Hooks to:

http://yourproxy.url/activity/project_a # for Project A
http://yourproxy.url/activity/project_b # for Project B

For example, we use it to notify both our Hipchat team room and our own Redmine-Tracker plugin using a config like this:

forward 'some_project', 'http://redmine.url.com/pivotal_activity.xml'
forward 'some_project', 'https://api.hipchat.com/v1/webhooks/pivotaltracker/?auth_token=API_TOKEN&room_id=ROOM_ID'

Postbin is a handy way to check whether requests are forwarded correctly. Go to http://www.postbin.org/ and create a bin, then configure it for one of your projects using forward 'project', 'http://www.postbin.org/TOKEN'. Going to your postbin url should give you a list of all activity hooks tracker has sent to you.

Arguably the easiest way to get the proxy up and running is to spin up a Heroku app. Assuming you've got the heroku gem installed and configured and the configuration set up as above using git, run:

heroku create your-app-name --stack cedar

You might also want to add thin to your Gemfile and a Procfile containing:

web: bundle exec thin start -p $PORT

Then commit your changes and push your app to heroku:

git push heroku master

Going to your newly created app's url should now give you "Hello."

Important: Heroku by default idles out free applications (those that only use 1 dyno) after a couple of minutes and further requests need to spin up a whole new instance, which takes some time. To prevent your app from idling out, and also to get the benefit of availability monitoring, use a service like WasItUp to monitor the site. Simply go to WasItUp, enter your app url, expect the content to be "Hello." and enter your mail address. Your proxy should be up all night.

• Clone the project
• bundle install
• rake test

Copyright (c) 2011 Christoph Olszowka, Capita Unternehmensberatung GmbH. See LICENSE for details.