I think I’m not the only one who dreads visiting the hog that is bugzilla. It is very aptly named, but a real pain to work with at times. Mostly, what I really don’t like about bugzilla is that it’s 1) really slow to load and in particular search, 2) has a very cluttered interface with all kinds of distracting information that I don’t care about. Every time I think to quickly look up a bug, or search something specific, get all bugs related to some feature in gedit or even open just all bugs in a certain product, bugzilla just gets in the way.
So I introduce bugzini (https://github.com/jessevdk/bugzini), the light-weight bugzilla front-end which runs entirely in the local browser, using the bugzilla XML-RPC API, a simple local webservice implemented in Go and a JavaScript application running in the browser using IndexedDB to store bugs offline.
Screenshot of the main bug index listing
It’s currently at a state where I think it could be useful for other people as well, and it’s running reasonably well (although there are certainly still some small issues to work out). There are several useful features in bugzini currently which makes it much nicer to work with than bugzilla.
- Search as you type, both for products as well as bug reports. This is great because you get instantaneous results when looking for a particular bug. A simple query language enables searching for specific fields and creating simple AND/OR style queries as shown in the screenshot (see the README for more details)
- Products in which you are interested can be starred and results are shown for all starred products through a special selection (All Starred in the screenshot)
- Searches can be bookmarked and are shown in the sidebar so that you can easily retrieve them. In the screenshot one such bookmark is shown (named file browser) which shows all bugs which contain the terms file and browser
- bugzini keeps track of which bugs contain new changes since your last visit and marks them (bold) similar to e-mail viewers. This makes it easy to see which bugs have changed without having to track this in bugzilla e-mails instead
Viewing a bug
Try it out
To try out bugzini, simply do the following from a terminal:
git clone https://github.com/jessevdk/bugzini.git make ./bugzini -l
Please don’t forget to file issues if you find any.
This is really cool!
Did you see Buggy? Seems to be somewhat similar…
https://github.com/peterbe/buggy
Nice work Jesse! This is everything I want in a bugzilla interface. :)
Really nice! I wait for a good bugzilla interface since I started contributing.
Thanks for your work here!
Hi. This looks really great, but I was wondering how I could get some information to debug this. The bugzilla I’m trying to point this at uses a self signed certificate and I think it’s causing bugzini to break. However I have no way to get that information since the program doesn’t seem to log or print any errors.
Yes, bugzini is currently not tolerant/robust against errors. It was pretty much a scratch-n-itch project. Anyway, if you want to debug, you’ll just have to dig in the code. It’s pretty straightforward. The part of bugzini that talks to bugzilla is written in Go.