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Jan Schulz-Hofen on August 16, 2012

Jan Schulz-Hofen

I am the founder of Planio and I’m obsessed with automating systems to make work more efficient.

August 16, 2012 · 2 min read

Many of you have been asking for integration with external repositories, such as those hosted at GitHub, a very popular Git hosting provider. Up until now, Planio didn't support this. You had to use our own repo hosting to fully experience the joy of having tightly integrated version control, including commit statistics for project members, the ability to comment on or close issues or even track time right from a commit message.

Now, the worlds of Planio and other Git hosting services - such as GitHub - have come a lot closer: all the repository interaction goodness is available even if your repos aren't hosted with us!

How does this work?

Once you’ve told Planio your external repo URL, Planio will fetch and mirror the repo for you so that all the great repo features work as if it was hosted locally on Planio. In order to have Planio’s mirror update whenever new commits are pushed, we provide a handy web hook which you can call using curl in a post-receive hook script. If you use GitHub, you don't even need the hook script - you can simply configure this via their UI. Private repositories are supported as well. Planio will generate an SSH key pair for you and you can add the generated public key as a deploy key in order to grant Planio read-only access to your private repo. Ain’t that great?!

So here’s what you need to do if you want to use GitHub:

1. Create a free or paid Planio account at http://plan.io (but we’re sure you already have one!)
2. Logged in to your Planio account, navigate to Administration → Settings → Repositories and make sure that the Enable WS for repository management checkbox is active and that you have an API key set up
3. Create a project, then navigate to Settings → Repositories
4. Click on New repository
5. Select Git, choose an Identifier, enter the (ssh for private repositories, ssh or http for public repositories) URL of your GitHub repository in the Mirror from external URL field, then click Create
6. Back in your project, head over to the Repository tab, find and select the repository you just created in the sidebar
7. Should you not see the blue instructions screen, click on Help on the upper right
8. On GitHub, navigate to your repository, then to Settings → Webhooks → Add Webhook, fill in the information from the Set up web hook section in the Planio help and click Add webhook
9. Optional: if this GitHub repository is private or you have used its private SSH URL above, click on Deploy Keys (still on GitHub) and add the SSH public key from the Set up a public key (deploy key) section in the Planio help
10. A short while after your first commit, the repository will show up on Planio.

These steps may need a little adjusting if you’re using other platforms than GitHub or if you’re hosting your repos yourself. In the latter case, you may want to download and use the post-receive hook script that Planio generates for you.

But I want my repos hosted by Planio!

No worries! We strive to offer a great and comprehensive project management service in the cloud. All our plans (even the free Bronze plan) come with Git and Subversion repositories that are hosted in our super-secure and 24/7 monitored data center here in Germany. This will not change! Should you wish to host your repos with us, you're more than welcome to do so. You just have more options now.

Now, go ahead and enjoy mirrored and tightly integrated Git repos from your favorite hosting service in Planio - and be sure to let us know if you have any feedback or questions!