Upsource 2.5 Early Access is open!

Maria Khalusova

It has been slightly more than a year since the first ever Early Access Upsource build has seen the light. A lot has changed since then, two major releases came out, many new features were introduced, and our up-and-coming code review tool has significantly matured. And we are devoted to keep making it better, faster, and, of course, smarter!

Today we are opening the Early Access Program for the next major version – Upsource 2.5, which is planned to be made available within this year. Here’s what we have for you so far.

Enhanced Email Notifications

We no longer send emails as soon as some noteworthy event occurs (comment was left on your review, changes accepted or rejected, etc.). Instead, we bundle them and send a single email so you have less in your inbox to go through. It is also possible to fine-tune the types of notifications you want to receive. Don’t want to get notified when a review is closed by its author? Disable this particular notification on the Settings page! In addition to that, notifications also feature better code highlighting and other design improvements.

Reply by email

Another great feature of reworked email notifications you may notice on the screenshot above is the ability to reply to comments via email. Create a mailbox, configure it in Upsource and you’ll be able to participate in ongoing reviews without ever leaving your email client.

Smarter and faster indexer

Upsource 2.5 drastically reduces the time needed to index a newly added project by introducing bulk import of repositories and on-demand indexing of old revisions. While previously a repository with 10,000 commits took hours to index, it now takes only a few short minutes. Indexing has become 10x faster for Git projects.

Thanks to a smarter indexer, we are now able to reindex the project when settings such as project model or character encoding are changed.

Discussion Labels

Labels can now be applied to discussions to denote priority, category, or any other information that you find useful. Some predefined labels are provided (“bug”, “style”, “enhancement”, “help wanted”), others can be created on a per-project basis. As we strive to make our data eminently searchable, you’re able to find discussions marked with a certain label using label: query.

Branches page

See the activity across branches on the brand-new Branches page. You can quickly search the branches and see which ones are active or stale.

Default branch setting was added to the project configuration screen. When the default branch is set, the UI becomes a bit smarter when displaying the commits graph, rendering README files, comparing branches, etc.

Open in IDE

Version 2.0 introduced an IDE plugin that allowed interacting with Upsource from the IDE. In 2.5 we are providing integration in the opposite direction – it is now possible to open a review (or simply a piece of code) in the IDE by clicking a link in the browser so you can quickly resume work on the code under review.

Various improvements

• Sometimes to understand a change in the inline diff we need to see more than the default context. You can now gradually reveal additional lines of context by clicking on cut lines.
• Reviews can now be removed. Code comments, if any, are preserved as part of corresponding revisions.
• We now show the number of discussions right in the revisions list as well as in the list of reviews for instant visibility of your colleagues’ activity.
• Review timeline has a new option of showing only unresolved discussions.
• When an issue ID or review ID is present in the commit message we automatically attach the revision to the matching review if it’s’ open – which means you no longer have to do it manually. This behavior is always enabled and not configurable, we plan to provide more customisable workflows later on.

This list of features is not final, as we have more great surprises planned for you.
If you want to play with the EAP build, you can download it here. Please remember, that Early Access builds represent work in progress, therefore we recommend installing them on a trial server. See the reasons why.
As usual, we will be happy to hear your feedback!