Review Board 7.0.4 adds an assortment of new SSO SAML features to help meet the needs of IT departments everywhere, and long-awaited customization of tab stop widths in diffs.

All-New SAML Settings

IT departments now have greater control of user provisioning, access, and configuration.

Automatic user provisioning can now be turned off in SAML Settings, letting administrators better control who has access to the server.

Users can be explicitly disabled from logging into Review Board via SAML, even if the Identity Provider otherwise grants access. To do this, edit a user in the Administration UI and turn off their Active flag.

For more specialized SAML configurations, you can now set SAML_CONFIG_ADVANCED in your $sitedir/conf/settings_local.py file to tweak any python3-saml settings needed. For example:

SAML_CONFIG_ADVANCED = {
    'security': {
        'requestAuthnContext': False,
    },
}

Looking to provision a user for SAML SSO or automation purposes via the API? You can now create a user without specifying a password using the User API. The user account will only be accessible using SSO or an API Token.

Customizable Tab Stop Widths

Using tabs instead of spaces? You can finally customize the width of tab characters in your diffs. You can set this system-wide in Diff Settings. It defaults to 8.

Plus...

• Improved styling in Dark Mode
• Upgrade fixes when moving from very old versions of Review Board
• Fixed preserving commit range selections when paginating diffs
• Fixed an issue on Postgres where downloaded diffs could sometimes reorder files

All the details can be found in the release notes.

Coming Up

We've been working hard on a new major Review Board 7.1 and Power Pack 6 release, which offers Office document review and diffing, user roles and rules, new extension capabilities, a more seamless approach to managing licenses and getting support.

You'll hear more soon.

Let's get started!

To learn more about upgrading your server, see our upgrade instructions.

You can also use our official Docker images.

Review Board development is funded by Support and Power Pack

If you're using Review Board today, we'd like to see how we can work together. We offer:

• Full-service support contracts to help your IT department keep things running smoothly.
• Power Pack Document Review, Reports, new integrations, and more, with a free 30 day trial.

Your support and licenses help us fund and grow Review Board and keeps food on our tables. Reach out to us and we'll work with you on a plan that fits your needs.

RBTools is an extensible set of command line tools, a Python API, and workflow automations for code and document reviews on Review Board.

Today's release of RBTools 5.3 includes:

• Support for newer versions of Azure DevOps Server / Team Foundation Server.
• Fixes for running rbt on Windows after upgrading with the installer.
• Fixes for excluding filenames containing whitespaces when using rbt post --exclude with Git.
• Updates to rename the Cliosoft SOS integration to Keysight SOS.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

To learn more about RBTools, see the RBTools downloads page and documentation.

Let's upgrade!

To upgrade RBTools on Linux and macOS, run:

$ pip3 install -U RBTools

A Windows installer for RBTools is also available.

RBTools and Review Board development is funded by Support and Power Pack

If you're using Review Board today, we'd like to see how we can work together. We offer:

• Full-service support contracts to help your IT department keep things running smoothly.
• Power Pack Document Review, Reports, new integrations, and more, with a free 30 day trial.

These help us continue to fund and grow Review Board development. Contact us to discuss how we can work together to help support Review Board at your company.

RBTools is a set of command line tools and Python API for working with code and document reviews on Review Board.

Today's release of RBTools 5.2 improves compatibility across the product and fixes a few bugs. Highlights include:

• Subversion patches can now be applied when the patch originates from a different part of the repository (such as a different branch or tag).
• Mercurial revision lookups no longer result in unwanted debug output.
• ClearCase repositories can once again be located when using Review Board versions prior to 7.0.1.
• rbt patch --print can now be used when configuring advanced repository path matching using TREES in .reviewboardrc.
• Binary file types can now be detected when the file command isn't available.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

To learn more about RBTools, see the RBTools downloads page and RBTools 5.2 documentation.

Let's upgrade!

To upgrade RBTools on Linux and macOS, run:

$ pip3 install -U RBTools

A Windows installer for RBTools is also available.

RBTools and Review Board development is funded by Support and Power Pack

If you're using Review Board today, we'd like to see how we can work together. We offer:

• Full-service support contracts to help your IT department keep things running smoothly.
• Power Pack Document Review, Reports, new integrations, and more, with a free 60 day trial.

These help us continue to fund and grow Review Board development. Contact us to discuss how we can work together to help support Review Board at your company.

Review Board 7.0.3 is all about polish. We've tightened up the mobile experience, broadened diff and repository compatibility, improved performance, and added some new features for extension authors.

Better on Mobile

Review Board 7 introduced all-new UI for mobile devices, and we've greatly refined that UI in 7.0.3. Menus now fit snugly on small screens, instead of running off the side. More components respond natively to touch events. Commenting is cleaned up.

While there's still plenty to do, mobile is shaping up.

Better All Around

This release covers a lot of areas:

• Compatibility with a wider range of patch-generation tools
• Tweaks to dark mode
• Faster startup performance
• Faster search indexing performance, particularly when using diff ACL checks
• More reliable upgrades from very old versions of Review Board
• New extension and API capabilities
• Fixes for all sorts of diff rendering edge cases
• Bullet-proofing for repository authentication issues

And plenty more!

All the details can be found in the release notes.

Let's get started!

To learn more about upgrading your server, see our upgrade instructions.

You can also use our official Docker images.

Review Board development is funded by Support and Power Pack

If you're using Review Board today, we'd like to see how we can work together. We offer:

• Full-service support contracts to help your IT department keep things running smoothly.
• Power Pack Document Review, Reports, new integrations, and more, with a free 60 day trial.

These help us continue to fund and grow Review Board development.

For a limited time, get 18% off any new support contracts or Power Pack licenses. Offer now good until the end of January, 2025!

RBTools 5.1 brings a new set of patching improvements and fixes, along with a few new settings you can use to better manage your repositories.

Much-Improved Patching

We've completely rebuilt how RBTools applies patches files and lands changes. The new approach avoids edge cases for repositories like Mercurial, Perforce, and Subversion, and brings wider compatibility across GNU Patch, BSD Patch, and Apple Patch.

Mercurial users will finally be able to land or patch multiple commits in one go, removing the incompatibility between RBTools and Mercurial's own patching tool.

There's also better error handling, with breakdowns on what files failed to patch or simply conflicted with other changes, helping you hand-merge the changes.

If you're building in-house tools that need to land changes, you can now apply patches or customize behavior using the new Patcher implementation.

Centralized Settings Management

TREES

In RBTools 3, we deprecated the largely-hidden TREES setting in .reviewboardrc, which let you map repository paths to Review Board server URLs. We then removed it entirely in RBTools 4.

Bringing this back has been a frequent request. Now, not only can you use TREES again, but you can use it to customize any setting in RBTools, using your own .reviewboardrc!

Here's an example:

TREES = {
    'https://svn.example.com/': {
        'REVIEWBOARD_URL': 'https://reviews.example.com',
    },
    '/home/user/dev': {
        'MARKDOWN': False,
        'TRACKING_BRANCH': 'origin/rewrite',
    }
}

Organizations can also use this in combination with a $RBTOOLS_CONFIG_PATH (Linux/macOS) or %RBTOOLS_CONFIG_PATH% (Windows) environment variable to specify central directories containing shared .reviewboardrc files, to centrally manage RBTools for all developers.

COOKIES_STRICT_DOMAIN_MATCH

If you’re using multiple Review Board servers on the same domain, it can be possible for session cookies (needed for authentication) to conflict with each other. For example, cookies sent from rb.example.com would be used on staging.rb.example.com, and this may not be what you want.

You can now enable strict-domain cookies by enabling COOKIES_STRICT_DOMAIN_MATCH in .reviewboardrc (including in TREES).

For example:

COOKIES_STRICT_DOMAIN_MATCH = True

For compatibility reasons, this is off by default.

Plus...

• Improved compatibility and stability for uploading binary files in commits.
• New metadata options in rbt status-update set.
• Compatibility fixes for older versions of Review Board.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

To learn more about RBTools, see the RBTools downloads page and RBTools 5.1 documentation.

18% off for Review Board's 18th Birthday!

As a reminder, we're offering 18% off all new Power Pack licenses and support contracts for Review Board's 18th birthday.

This sale lasts until the end of 2024, and will help us ensure the future of Review Board for years to come.

We recently opened up to you all about the future of Review Board and the challenges of creating and sustaining an ethical business built around an Open Source product and keeping its development funded in a difficult market.

It hasn’t always been easy, but your responses reminded us why we do this. The outpouring of support, encouragement, and thoughtful feedback left us deeply appreciative and inspired. We’re grateful to have such a passionate and dedicated community behind us — our users are truly the heart of Review Board’s success, and we want to keep building for you.

This year, Review Board celebrates its 18th birthday, marking nearly two decades of helping developers create and collaborate together more effectively. It’s humbling to think back to those early days when we built a tool simply because we were frustrated with e-mailing diffs back and forth for review. The days before Git took off, the days before pull requests existed. Before the market was dominated by 800 pound gorillas and AI-focused upstarts. Our attempt at a modest solution to a common pain point has grown into a tool relied on by thousands of teams around the world, helping build products people enjoy and rely on every day.

Our way of saying thanks and hoping for your business

To thank you all and to celebrate 18 years of Review Board, we’re offering an 18% discount on all new Power Pack licenses and support contracts purchased through the end of the year. Your discount will last for the full 1 year term of any license or contract.

Power Pack and support contracts are how we fund Review Board’s development and how we keep food on our tables. If you depend on Review Board today, you can help us ensure we’re around for years to come. Lock in your 18% discount by purchasing Power Pack today, or talk to us at sales@beanbaginc.com if you’d like to discuss support, Purchase Orders, or billing that meets your year-end or new-year budget cycles.

And thank you once again for helping support Review Board!

— Christian, David, and Michelle from Beanbag

It's been a while since we've talked about the future of Review Board, and we felt it was time. We have some important topics to discuss.

We Need Your Help

We love working on this product. We began developing it in 2006, back before GitHub and Pull Requests existed. Back when code review was done over e-mail, bug trackers, and whiteboards, if it was done at all. It was a painful process, and we knew we had to innovate. Commenting directly on the code, viewing interdiffs, multi-line commenting, filterable dashboards, integration with other tools—all of it was new. Many of those inventions have since become standard across the market.

That's almost 20 years of helping make code review what it is today. But that could change. The instability in the tech sector, the downsizing, the cost-cutting… It's impacted us.

Review Board is open source and will remain so. We've never required a fee to use the software. Continued development is instead funded through support contracts, Power Pack, and sponsored feature development as part of our company, Beanbag, Inc.

We'd like to share some facts you may not know:

1. Beanbag is a small company. We are three very dedicated people developing Review Board and our family of products.
2. We're self-sufficient, living off the sales we work hard to earn and keep. We're not burning through VC money or operating as a loss leader for a giant tech company.
3. Microsoft and GitHub have been doing what they’re good at: dominating the market, putting smaller companies out of business, and making it hard for the rest of us to stand out, stay funded, and innovate.
4. Review Board is used in a wide range of industries, at companies of all sizes, for software and hardware development, but…
5. Over 98% of our install base uses Review Board completely for free.

To put it simply, the future of Review Board depends on us making sales.

We have a lot planned for this product. We've been working toward some big changes, capabilities no tool on the market is even exploring, and we want to see our vision through.

We're fighting to make that happen.

But we do need your help.

If your company is using Review Board today and finds any value in it at all, we'd like to talk to you directly to find out:

1. What you get out of Review Board today.
2. What would keep you using Review Board tomorrow.
3. If there’s an opportunity to work with your company on a support contract, Power Pack license, or sponsored development. We'll work with you to meet your budgets.

If you're open to discussion, please reach out directly, and we'll schedule time to talk with you or anyone from your company.

What We're Working On

Here's just a taste of what we've been building and setting the groundwork to build:

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) review and diffing.
• Google Docs review and diffing.
• New innovations for improving the code review process, visualizing code, and aiding in very large reviews (we're keeping some of these under wraps for now).
• Deep pull request integration with GitHub and GitLab, letting you combine the best of their services and the best of ours.
• A reworked Dashboard for better filtering and tracking of review status and workloads.
• More organizational control over access policies and custom review request approval flows.

These are just some of our plans.

Are we on the right track? Can you help us get there?

Thanks for your time,
Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge
Creators of Review Board

Administrators who also review code: This release is for you.

Mercurial users: You, too.

Administrators, Review and Rejoice!

We never had the best experience for administrators who need to review code. When looking at a review request with a draft in progress, the administrator would see some information from the draft, some from the published review request. Commenting didn't work until the draft was published. It was... subpar.

We've completely reworked this experience.

Now, if you're reviewing code, you'll get the same experience as everyone else. You'll see only what's published. If there's a draft, or you need to make changes, you can switch over to a draft mode and see what the user's working on.

Stronger Mercurial Support

Managing your repositories with Mercurial? We've done a lot this release to make your workflows work better:

• Multi-commit review requests are better supported. A lot of corner cases from Mercurial's design have been worked around and fixed.
• Commits introducing binary files can now be uploaded, and those files reviewed in the diff viewer.

We have more Mercurial goodness coming in the next major release of RBTools.

Plus...

• Wider compatibility for downloaded Git and Mercurial diffs.
• Compatibility fixes for the latest Perforce for Python releases.
• Fixes for sending e-mails when DMARC DNS records aren't in a standard format.
• Various improvements throughout the review request UI.

All the details can be found in the release notes.

Let's get started!

To learn more about upgrading your server, see our upgrade instructions.

You can also use our official Docker images.

Review Board development is funded by Support and Power Pack

If you're using Review Board today, we'd like to see how we can work together. We offer:

• Full-service support contracts to help your IT department keep things running smoothly.
• Power Pack Document Review, Reports, new integrations, and more, with a free 60 day trial.

These help us continue to fund and grow Review Board development.

Dark Mode has arrived in Power Pack!

You can now review documents and analyze reports in the late hours of the night (when you should probably be sleeping) without bright light searing your eyes.

This is a free upgrade for all Power Pack users, and requires Review Board 7.0.1 or higher.

Power Pack 5.3 also comes with:

• An important security fix for viewing PDFs (pdf.js CVE-2024-4765).
• Automatic scroll lock when viewing diffs of documents.
• Better compatibility with Review Board 7.

For the complete list of changes and installation instructions, see the release notes.

What else does Power Pack do?

• PDF document review and diffing, allowing you to review documents, schematics, designs, contracts, and code all in one place.
• Report generation, giving you insight into code review practices in your organization.
• Advanced server management for scalability, database management, and splitting/merging installs.
• Eenterprise source code management systems, including AWS CodeCommit, Azure DevOps/TFS, Bitbucket Server, Keysight SOS, GitHub Enterprise, and ClearCase.

Review Board development is funded by Power Pack

You can try Power Pack free for 60 days or purchase a license for your Review Board server.

Review Board 7.0.1 fixes some important compatibility issues, and makes further improvements to the UI, building upon what we started in Review Board 7.

Let's dig in.

RBTools 5 Compatibility Fixes

In Review Board 7.0, posting changes against Git or ClearCase repositories using RBTools 5 could sometimes result in an error. This depended entirely on your RBTools and Review Board configuration and affected users who didn't specify an explicit repository in .reviewboardrc on a server without Power Pack.

This was due to a bug in our API combined with an oversight in RBTools 5. We recommend updating to 7.0.1 as soon as possible to avoid any issues posting changes for review.

Document Review Fixes

For users leveraging Review Board 7 with Power Pack for Document Review, you can once again move and resize your draft comments on documents. This had regressed in 7.0 but is now fixed.

UI Improvements

We've been working on further updates to Review Board 7's UI:

• Improved font sizes in the page header.
• Fixed a few button interactions (enabling/disabling extensions or deleting items from the database in the Administration UI).
• Introduced a whole new condition rule editor for configuring integrations.

Plus...

• Better stability when your cache server goes down.
• Asana integration fixes.
• Wider compatibility for building extensions with or without static media.
• Fixes for crashes when viewing some interdiffs.
• New API and extension improvements as part of the Review Board Platform.

All the details can be found in the release notes.

Let's get started!

To learn more about upgrading your server, see our upgrade instructions. You can also use our official Docker images.

If you need assistance with your server, we can help under a support contract.