Perforce Swarm Review Automation
Where it started
As my team began setting up a working review pipeline using Perforce Swarm (P4 Code Review) I saw an issue. Communication became a hassle and spanning too many applications and as such it harmed the teams work process. And so I set to find a solution that would allow for a connection between our most familiar communication outlet (Discord) and P4 Swarm.
Where it stands
The current form of the Perforce Swarm review automation is a Discord bot, hosted on an AWS Ubuntu server that I set up during my off-university time. It utilizes Swarm's "Workflow" and "Test" features to send POST requests to a webhook endpoint on a domain I own, which routes to my server via Cloudflare Tunnel.
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When the bot receives information about a new review it uses Perforce's REST API to get more information on the review before opening a new forum thread in the team's channel. The bot will tag all the reviewers assigned and will copy over the description and create a checklist for the definitions of done. With all the necessary data (user mapping, review data, server information) are saved and organized in PostgreSQLdatabases.Â
A tool for others
After making sure that the pipeline works for my team, I added support for multiple guilds (servers), adding a guild config table to the SQL databases for Swarm credentials, channels, settings. I had to refactor the code substantially, adding guild ID to each database table to isolate each team's data. The webhook endpoint changed to a per-server route (/swarm/<guild_id>).
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I added a role-based system, where team leads can manage user mappings and review lifecycle (approving, closing), while regular users get read-only access. For easy setup I added an interactive wizard that walks a new team through configuration step by step, so onboarding another team takes minutes, not code changes.
