Barkeep is very simply code review system.
Your first steps should be to watched video on the project page, next you can simple try barkeep demo page.
What amazed me was usage of vagrant. Vagrant is great tool you should have in your toolbox. Vagrant is tool to simplify environment setup. You can build your development setup, or project setup or whatever you need.
The Barkeep example is great. To run barkeep, we simply do following steps:
$ script/setup_vagrant.rb
and that’s it. At http://localhost:8080/ we can access Barkeep and start using it. For me this is the way we should prepare our stuff.
Note: For Mac user you must have 64bit MySql, otherwise installation will fail.
- bundle exec vagrant halt will shut down the Vagrant
- bundle exec vagrant destroy will destroy it.
Of course for production use you have to install it, but for playing Vagrant is enough.
The good thing about it is that Barkeep has REST API and nice and simple barkeep client.
Of course Barkeep is not only one code review tool. What is said is that “Comparing barkeep to other code review tools” page is a … bullshit.
Few facts:
- Crucible has post review
- Crucible and Gerrit has notification schemas, even Crucible has streams – from my point of view it is great feature.
- Crucible, and Gerrit has nice UI, and it is more we used to something.
- and last but not least, Reitveld has small codebase, so you can hack it without any problems (I would prefer to hack Barkeep – Ruby), and for sure as Java Developer I can hack in both Gerrit and Crucible.
I don’t defend others as I don’t use them, but I think Barkeep guys are not fair.
Despite of that it is very good tool, so for sure you should give a try.
I think that main feature of the barkeep, naturally way support of post-review, is also its major drawback. I found that post-commit reviews are good at the beginning, but can bite you in later stages of development.