Knowledge Base: Integrating with Basecamp

Beanstalk can integrate with your Basecamp account, providing clean notification posts for each commit to your team in your Basecamp projects. In addition to posting messages, Beanstalk can also post time sheets for a project when you include tags in the commit message.

What it looks like…

When Beanstalk and Basecamp are integrated, each commit to your repository will result in a post to Basecamp. This post will show who made the commit, the revision, commit message, and affected files. Beanstalk will also insert a link to redirect back to the changeset in Beanstalk. Here is what the post would look like in Basecamp:

If tags are included in your commit message, time sheets are posted in Basecamp too. Here is what the time tracking would look like in Basecamp:

To setup Basecamp integration, follow the steps below.

Integrate your account and project

Before you get started, make sure you enable API access in your Basecamp account. This can be found at the bottom of the Account (Upgrade/Invoices) section in your Basecamp account.

In order to integrate Basecamp with Beanstalk, you must first set up the integration settings within your repository. To do this, go to your Repository then Setup → Integration → Basecamp. To get started with the setup, click on Activate inside the page.

Define Account Information

In this step, you should define your Basecamp account information and API key. Your API key can be found in the My Info section (look in the top right in Basecamp).

Choose Project

Next, you can choose the project where Beanstalk will post notifications. It’s best to associate each repository with the corresponding project in Basecamp.

Setup messaging and time tracking

On this step you can select whether you want:

• to post messages to Basecamp and choose message category
• to post time sheets to track time
• to post messages to Basecamp and choose message category and post time sheets to track time

Only the options you select will work in Basecamp. So if you selected only messaging, time sheets will not go to Basecamp and vice versa.

Assign users

If you selected time tracking on the previous step, you have one more additional step for setting up Basecamp integration. On this step you can choose the Beanstalk users that you want to track time for, and corresponding users from Basecamp. Only the matched users will have time tracking enabled, so if you add users in the future make sure to update the settings.

Activate and Save Changes

Finally, once you have confirmed everything, you can activate the changes.

How to use the integration

To test and make sure everything works, commit something to your repository. You should see the new commit notification in your Basecamp project. It may take a minute or so to post.

To post time sheets for a project, include tags in the commit message. For example:

Fixed logo positioning in IE6 [time:2.00]