Copydog converts issues between Redmine and Trello on the fly. It’s a small third-party daemon, monitoring changes in both systems and keeping them in sync as much as possible.
You might find this tool useful after reading How it works.
Warning
Copydog is in active development, it’s not ready for production yet. However, please, feel free to experiment/test and use the code.
Copydog is available via PyPI:
pip install copydog
You also need a Redis instance to store intermediate results of syncronization. Follow installation instructions.
For best experience please install Pandoc to convert issues descriptions between Markdown and Textile. However, it’s optional.
Copydog runs on python 2.6-2.7 only. Python 3 support is planned in future releases.
For copydog to work you need both Trello and Redmine accounts.
If you don’t have an account, head over to signup page and register. After that you need to obtain you API key and user token.
Note
Obtain Trello token granting forever read and write access:
https://trello.com/1/authorize?key=substitutewithyourapplicationkey&name=My+Application&expiration=never&response_type=token&scope=read,write
Copydog works with Redmine 1.3 and higher. You’ll be needing your redmine instance url and your API key.
To obtain the API key visit your profile page at redmine http://exampleredminehost/my/account and click Show link under API access key section.
Copydog reads config variables from yaml files, so we need to make one. Here is how config file might look like:
clients:
redmine:
host: http://redmine.org
api_key: ac7785e2c593ad6d7f539f2f90be26ba0851d18a
project_id: playground
write: 1
trello:
api_key: 9e90d281ed678b56b041871c3651ee2d
token: e80a1138e0b5ea08d506fcabe6c17196542af7ee684c6c24b6f5b79
board_id: 4fe889e4c23b476f4a189ca5
write: 1
storage:
redis:
host: localhost
port: 6379
db: 0
password: null
copydog:
pandoc: '/usr/bin/pandoc'
beat: 60
Note, how config is separated into sections: clients, storage and copydog. First one is required, other are completely optional. Clients have to be redmine and trello, with following attributes:
This keys can be obtained via browser, please read above sections for both Redmine and Trello.
Note
Copydog supports syncing one redmine project with one trello board at a time, so you need to specify project_id (string slug or integer) and board_id (string id).
Storage config might be completely omitted if you’re using default Redis connection. Write flag allows copydog to modify contents on a client, set it to 0 to disable sync writes to either redmine or trello.
You can optionally provide tracker_id and/or fixed_version_id in redmine section to limit the number of issues being synced.
Note
While Redmine can handle thousands of issues painlessly, Trello is simply not suited for that amount of cards per board. I recommend using tracker_id or fixed_version_id filters to make better use of Trello.
By default copydog polls servers every minute. Is not a big burden for external APIs and sufficient to stay up to date. If it doesn’t suite your needs, feel free to change the beat frequency under copydog section in config (it’s called beat and is measured in seconds between polls.
To launch the app:
copydog --config=<path_to_your_yaml_config>
Copydog will start monitoring new changes in both services and mirror them accordingly. If you wish to sync all existing issues/card, use --fullsync option:
copydog --fullsync --config=<path_to_your_yaml_config>
If you’re not developing copydog it’s useful to run it as daemon process. To daemonize copydog, run it with a start argument:
copydog start --config=<path_to_your_yaml_config>
Copydog will run in background unless you stop it:
copydog stop --config=<path_to_your_yaml_config>
Copydog polls both Redmine and Trello in turns, converting data from one service to the other. It queries first service for issues, updated since the last read and saves their identifiers and timestamps in storage. If there are any, they’re converted into sister service type. Copydog tracks both new issues/cards and updates of existing ones by storing references between issues and cards. Trello cards are created with comments, featuring urls to corresponding redmine issues.
Copydog tries to be smart when transferring cards to issues and vice versa. Redmine statuses are associated with Trello lists and are mapped by exact name match, so make sure you have same set of Statuses and Lists in your project and your board. Assigned members are linked by username or full name as a fallback.
| Redmine | Trello | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| subject | name | |
| description | desc | Text is converted with pandoc, if available. See Markup conversion. |
| assigned_to | idMembers | Redmine doesn’t support multiple assignees, the first one is taken. |
| status_id | idList | Copydog maps each status to list by name. |
| project_id | board_id | One board is synced with one project only. |
| due_date | due |
Other data like priorities, comments, labels are not synced.
Copydog tries to use Pandoc tool to convert issue text between services. For example, Trello understands Markdown and Redmine uses Textile. If you don’t have pandoc installed, texts will be transferred as is. It doesn’t always look nice, so I advise you to install pandoc anyway.
You should provide a path to pandoc binary in config under copydog section to make it work.
copydog:
pandoc: '/usr/bin/pandoc'
Copydog needs intermediate storage to save references between issues in Redmine and Trello. It also save datetime when items were last updated to make sure we’re not going to sync issues back and forth forever. Copydog remembers time of last sync, so it will resume its work from the same spot.
Redis database is used for storing this data. If you wish to use another storage, you should write your own backend.
Copydog is developed and maintained by Baryshev Ilya. Feel free to submit issues or comments at development Trello board.
To launch tests execute:
nosetests
Some tests make actual API read requests, but they’re disabled by default, to run them use:
nosetests -c all
These tests will pass if you have following env variables set: