I get excited when I have a chance to try new software and…it just works!¹ That was the case with [[git-bug]]. It’s a bug tracker that is fully embedded in git. You use the same git repo that you are using for code development to track and update bugs and issues.

On [[MacOS]], brew install git-bug and you’re up and running.

git bug user create will setup your local user. It will read from your local git settings for full name and email address. The only other thing you’ll need is a full link to an avatar image — the picture that represents you.

Next up is setting up bridges. git-bug supports [[GitLab]], [[GitHub]], [[JIRA]], and minor support for [[Launchpad]], as well as custom implementations.

The [[Moa Party]] project is what I’m going to experiment using git-bug on, which we host on [[GitLab]]. You run git bug bridge configure and walk through a terminal interface to fill out your GitLab server details (yes, you can use it with self-hosted GitLab instances), as well as your personal login and an access token.

When you create a personal access token, you’ll need to give it api access permission, which pretty much can do everything on your behalf. I initially created a token without that access, and had a heck of a time figuring out how to fix that. Turns out, go into your local ~/.gitconfig and delete the token and identity with the wrong permissions. And, git-bug bridge rm the original bridge you created with the wrong token, then you can git-bug bridge configure a new default.

And now, unfortunately, I nuked identities using the Makefile (and found @agentofuser in the issues from a couple of years ago) and am currently in a state where I can’t create a new identity.

OK, I got it working through the age old trick of … downloading a new copy of the repo and setting it up again.

There is a recent (7 days ago) issue thread that seems to indicate the GitLab API has been improved and this can be working again. git-bug itself works, and I managed to import the existing GitLab issues, but I can’t push changes to the GitLab issues.

Since the [[Agora]] itself works with git a lot, we may actually be able to link git-bugs with the Agora itself in some way, but that’s pretty deep git magic for me, since I don’t fully understand how git-bug works / where it stores stuff in git.