Perforce Repositories¶

Review Board supports posting and reviewing code on Perforce repositories. Unlike with most types of source code management systems, Perforce tracks information around in-development changes on the Perforce server. Review Board makes use of this information to help post changesets for review and to indicate when a changeset has been submitted to the repository.

Review Board supports username/password authentication or ticket-based authentication for Perforce, and also supports connecting using SSL or Stunnel.

To post changes for review, you will need to use RBTools. Standard Perforce diffs leave out a lot of important information necessary to properly identify files, which RBTools works around. See Using RBTools with Perforce for more information.

Note

This guide assumes that you’re adding a Perforce repository that’s hosted somewhere in your network or one that’s accessible by your Review Board server. Review Board requires local or network access to your repository.

Follow the documentation in the links below if your Perforce repository is hosted on one of these services, as configuration may differ.

Assembla

Installing Perforce Support¶

Before you add the repository, you will need to install the p4 command line tool in a system path (or in a place accessible by your web server’s process), and the p4python package.

Installing p4 will require registering your information on Perforce’s website. If you want to download without registering, or need a specific version, you can use their downloads archive.

To install p4python, run:

$ pip install p4python

You will then need to restart your web server for the new module to be noticed by Review Board.

Adding the Repository¶

To configure a Perforce repository, first proceed to add the repository and select Perforce from the Repository type field.

You will see a Path field, which should contain the value normally used in P4PORT. This can be a standard Perforce server path, or it can be prefixed with ssl: (to use SSL encryption, if enabled by the server and p4python), or stunnel: (to tunnel encryption to a standard Perforce server, if stunnel is installed).

Determining your Repository Path¶

To determine the repository path to use, run the following inside a checkout of your repository:

$ p4 info

Look for the Server address field. The value listed is the path you should use for Review Board.

Using SSL¶

If your Perforce server listens over a SSL connection (and you’re using version 2012.1 or higher for the Perforce server), you can connect over SSL by prefixing ssl: to the path. For example:

ssl:perforce.example.com:1668

You can follow Perforce’s guide on enabling SSL support to get started.

Note that your p4python module must be compiled with SSL support. This should be the case for standard builds, but if not, you will see an error explaining the situation. Please note that p4python is provided by Perforce, and is not maintained by the Review Board developers.

Using Stunnel¶

If you’re not using a SSL-backed connection, and your Perforce server is located in a different network, you may want to set up a Stunnel connection. This will provide an encrypted connection between Review Board and your Perforce server, and can be used for any version of Perforce.

To start, please follow Perforce’s guide on using Stunnel. This will take care of the configuration on the Perforce server.

You will then need to install Stunnel on the Review Board server. Review Board 2.0.23+/2.5.4+ support Stunnel version 3 and 4, while earlier versions of Review Board require Stunnel version 3. The stunnel binary must be in the web server’s path.

You can then configure your repository path to point to your Stunnel proxy. To do this, just prefix your standard repository path with stunnel: and list the port that the Stunnel server is running on. Review Board will take care of the rest.

For example, if Stunnel is listening on port 2666, you can use:

stunnel:perforce.example.com:2666

Review Board will automatically set up a local tunnel client as necessary. It will bind this to a port between 30000 and 60000 on localhost, and proxy all requests through it.

Using Ticket-Based Authentication¶

Review Board supports using ticket-based authentication for Perforce. To enable this, simply provide the credentials for the Perforce user you want Review Board to use and then check Use ticket-based authentication.

Review Board will handle storing the ticket information and requesting new tickets when necessary. You don’t have to do anything else.