Review Board 6 is all about focusing on your code review experience in a pleasant environment.
The UI is bright, soft, and colorful. The diffs are easier on the eyes, and easier to navigate. The review process is streamlined, a new review banner guiding you through creating, managing, and publishing your review request, reviews, and replies. Rich commenting is effortless, with Markdown formatting aided by a helpful new toolbar.
And that's just the beginning. Let us introduce you to Review Board 6.
A bright start
We’ve been improving the look and feel of Review Board, softening and brightening the visuals, giving content some breathing room, and sanding down rough edges.
The color palette and font size used in diffs have been refined to make it easier to read long blocks of code.
Much of our UI has been made more accessible and mobile-friendly.
This is the first step toward a larger UI refresh planned for Review Board 7.
Looking for something less bright? Say, a dark mode? That's in the works, but for now, we find Dark Reader to be pretty useful ourselves!
An improved review experience
In past versions of Review Board, your draft review requests, reviews, and replies were all managed separately, each with its own green draft banner.
Review Board 6 now includes a new Unified Review Banner, which summarizes every draft that still needs to be published on a review request.
This banner allows you to:
- See all your drafts in one place
- Publish all your drafts together with fewer e-mails, or publish them independently as before
- Create new reviews on a review request
This banner is always visible on the screen, and will help guide you through the review process.
The old Review, Add Comment, and Ship It! buttons on the review request’s action bar have been moved to a new Review menu on the banner, helping you create, manage, and publish your reviews from anywhere on a review request.
To help get going, we’ve added new tips and tricks to the Review Dialog, shown when clicking Review -> Create a New Review.
And finally, you can review your own diffs and files before they’re published, helping make comments that guide reviewers through your change.
Craft Markdown comments with a click
It’s easier than ever to compose Markdown text for your reviews, comments, and review requests through the new Markdown formatting toolbar.
Toggle between bold, italic, strike-through, and code literals. Create lists, link to URLs, and then go beyond text by uploading and embedding images.
Better file attachment management
File attachments are an important part of many people's workflows. Review Board 6 now makes it easier to track which files are published, which you're introducing in a draft, and which are pending deletion.
When adding, updating, or deleting file attachments, a label is now placed on the thumbnail showing its status:
- New: The file attachment was newly-added in this draft.
- New Revision: A new, updated revision of a file attachment was added in this draft.
- Pending Deletion: The file attachment will be deleted when the draft is published.
- Draft: The file attachment’s caption has been updated in the draft.
If a file attachment is pending deletion, you can now restore it by clicking Undo Delete in the file attachment’s actions menu.
Take action with extensions
Review Board’s extension abilities have grown once again.
The new Actions system makes it easier to add, hide, and reorder actions on the review request’s action bar, on the page header, and the navigation bar.
Client-side extensions can now be written using TypeScript and Spina, and bound together using ES Modules.
Server-side extensions can benefit from enhanced Python type hints and pytest-based unit tests.
Important compatibility updates
We’ve dropped support for Python 3.7 and added 3.12. Please note that not all third-party repository support is compatible yet with 3.12.
We’ve also dropped Subvertpy support. To use Subversion with Review Board, make sure to install PySVN.
Plus…
- Faster automated code review results
- A better default view for dashboards, showing all your incoming and outgoing review requests
- A service health check URL (
/health/) for monitoring, scaling, and fault tolerance - New Single Sign-On options, for wider Identity Provider compatibility
- Enhanced API error reporting, with string-based error types
- Performance and usability improvements all throughout Review Board
- And more!
The Review Board 6 release notes cover all the changes in this release in detail.
Ready to upgrade?
For most users of Review Board 5, Review Board 6 will be a drop-in replacement with minimal downtime.
Still, make sure you have a backup of your database and site directory, and please perform a test upgrade on a test server. Then follow the upgrade instructions.
If you’re using Docker, follow our Docker instructions to deploy new containers. Review Board 6’s official Docker images are based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Python 3.11.
If you need assistance, we can help support your Review Board server with a plan that meets your needs.