August 30, 2007

Add SVN revision number to page titles for QA

At EastMedia, we generally run a development server which gets deployed from the trunk of each projects repository on a regular basis. One way we have improved the bug reports we get as part of our QA process is asking the testers to note the revision number of the build they were looking at when the bug occurred. To make this as easy as possible, during development we include the SVN revision number in the <title> tag of every page.

The code to determine the revision number lives in application_helper.rb:

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def revision
  @revision ||= if svn_info_from_working_copy 
    svn_info_from_working_copy["Revision"].value
  else
    last_revision_in_log
  end
rescue
  @revision = "UNKNOWN"
end

def svn_info_from_working_copy
  @svn_info ||= YAML.parse(`svn info #{RAILS_ROOT}`)
end

def last_revision_in_log
  File.readlines(RAILS_ROOT + "/../../revisions.log").last.split[3]
end

And the header RHTML looks like this:



<title>r<%= revision  %> | ...Normal page title...</title>

Posted in Agile, Rails | By bhelmkamp

1 Response to “Add SVN revision number to page titles for QA”

  1. # Sebastian Says:

    August 30, 2007 at 10:29 AM

    At streeteasy we have an HTML comment near the bottom of the page with the server name, branch and revision number.

    It’s not as good for bug reporting, but you don’t have to worry about removing it when pushing it out to production.