YouTrack Bookmarklet: one click to submit new issue

March 18th, 2010 by Ekaterina

The upcoming version of YouTrack (aka YouTrack Daring) introduces the bookmarklet, a little tool for your browser to submit new issues with just one click. No need to open YouTrack to create an issue, no need to even switch between browser tabs or windows.

Bookmarklet supports all most important options of the standard Create New Issue dialog.

To get the bookmarklet, the next time you visit the issue tracker do the following:

  1. Open keyboard shortcuts quick reference: click Help — Shortcuts
  2. Drug-n-drop the highlighted “Create Issue” link to your browser’s toolbar. If you prefer Internet Explorer, then right-click on the link and add it to favorites.

There you have it. Now click the button, specify issue attributes, take and attach screenshots (Ctrl+Alt+S) or attach files (Ctrl+Alt+A). Another click, and the issue submitted. Just like that.

Have a nice day and track with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack team

YouTrack news: new EAP build and feature freeze

March 15th, 2010 by Ekaterina

Hello, everyone! Today we have two major news for you.
First, we have published the new EAP build (build #664) for YouTrack Daring. You probably already know that if you follow us on twitter. What you don’t know yet is that with this EAP build we’ve completed general development of custom fields. All planned functionality has been implemented, and now we’re polishing details. Check back soon for a detailed post on custom fields.

As for the EAP, check the Release notes, download the build, give a try to all new features and feel free to post your feedback and questions on our forum and issue tracker.

Moving on to the second item we’ve got for you today: With today’s EAP we announce a feature freeze for YouTrack Daring. We’re now focused solely on enhancing, improving, testing and fixing. The feature freeze means we’re on the homestretch to release the new version, so stay tuned for updates!


Track with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack team

Important: YouTrack database activity on March 5 partially lost due to hardware failure

March 6th, 2010 by Jura Gorohovsky

What happened. JetBrains YouTrack instance at youtrack.jetbrains.net experienced an outage yesterday, on Friday, March 5, that resulted in loss of YouTrack database updates that were made from 5:00 GMT to approximately 21:00 GMT on March 5. At 21:00 GMT, YouTrack was found to be unable to read its database due to partial data corruption. YouTrack has been out of service for several hours since then, and was restored at 7:00 GMT on March 6 from a database backup as of 5:00 GMT, March 5. We’re trying to find out what caused the problem and it currently seems like a hardware failure.

Who is affected by this problem. This problem affects users of JetBrains product issue trackers hosted at youtrack.jetbrains.net (specifically, issue trackers for IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, TeamCity, RubyMine, dotTrace, MPS, WebStorm, PhpStorm, and PyCharm) who executed the following activities from 5:00 GMT to approximately 21:00 GMT on March 5:

  • Created new issues.
  • Updated existing issues. Updating an issue means changing issue summary, description or attributes; linking issues; attaching files to issues; commenting issues; voting for issues; tagging issues; marking issues as favorites or marking issues to watch.
  • Updated their user profiles. Updating a user profile means modifying notification settings; changing a set of watched items; changing a password or other modifiable profile details.
  • Created or updated tags or saved searches.

If you have not used youtrack.jetbrains.net from 5:00 GMT to approximately 21:00 GMT on March 5, or if you are using any other YouTrack instance, you are not affected by this problem.

We at YouTrack team sincerely apologize to everyone affected by this problem. We’re currently examining our server hardware to find out which specific subsystem caused the problem and why. Knowing the source of the problem will help us make sure that it’s not going to happen again.

If you have additional questions regarding this unfortunate failure, please contact us at youtrack-feedback@jetbrains.com

YouTrack Daring EAP: New Build Published

February 26th, 2010 by Ekaterina

The new Daring EAP build (number 600) has been published today. The latest build comprises a number of recently fixed issues and brings you several new features and enhancements. Just a couple of improvements to mention:

  • You can now search for issues which relate to, depend on, or duplicate other issues by using the corresponding keywords (relates to:, depends on:, and duplicates:) and <issue ID> as a value.
  • A new keyboard shortcut - to help you quickly copy current issue’s details to the clipboard. By successively pressing Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C , you can now select current issue’s ID, expand selection to issue’s summary, and, finally, clear selection. Simply use the old good Ctrl+C for the copy operation on the selected value(s).

See the list of new features or check the complete Release notes for more details.

Download new EAP build and evaluate the improvements.


Track with pleasure!
- JetBrains YouTrack team

YouTrack Daring: New EAP Build

February 12th, 2010 by Ekaterina

Good news, everyone! We’ve just published the new YouTrack Daring EAP — build number 574.

Download and check what’s new in this build:

Don’t hesitate and send your feedback to us — we always wait for it at our issue tracker and YouTrack forum.

Wish you tracking with pleasure!
JetBrains YouTrack Team

JIRA 4 Integration Plug-in

January 28th, 2010 by Jura Gorohovsky

We’ve announced that YouTrack Daring EAP builds support integration with JIRA 4. This is true but in order to enable integration, you’ll need to download JIRA 4 integration plug-in.

This is a “version 1″ JIRA plugin, meaning that you should deploy it into WEB-INF\lib directory of your JIRA installation. (See Managing JIRA plugins for details.)

Also, make sure to enable JIRA RPC plugin to invoke JIRA operations remotely.

If you’re not sure what else you should do to enable JIRA integration on YouTrack side, see relevant items in YouTrack FAQ.

YouTrack Daring Goes EAP

January 27th, 2010 by Jura Gorohovsky

Remember YouTrack Daring Roadmap that we announced just before New Year?

We’re starting to deliver on the promise by opening a new Early Access Program to let you download and evaluate early YouTrack Daring builds as we make them available.

As usual with EAP builds, they may cause quality concerns at times but we’re valiantly pre-testing Daring builds at our own YouTrack instance, and only the most stable of them are allowed to go EAP.

Important note! Do not use EAP builds in your primary production environment because YouTrack 1.0 database is not forward compatible with YouTrack Daring database. That means, if you’re not satisfied with the quality of Daring builds, you will not be able to revert to YouTrack 1.0 other than by rolling back to a pre-upgrade backup of your database and losing your progress along the way.

Once again, we kindly ask you to provide feedback on your experience with the new YouTrack version. You can submit feedback in several forms - specifically, feel free to:

Here’s a quick list to remind you of some of the things that the new YouTrack Daring brings to the table:

  • Custom attributes to extend the predefined set of issue states: you can now configure YouTrack to save due dates, issue severity, browser and operating system version, or any other details that you may need to know about your issues. You create custom attributes using arbitrary enumerations or common types such as date and integer.

    Note that the initial implementation of custom attributes in EAP builds only supports creating them in Full Screen View and viewing them. Neither search nor commands support custom attributes just yet.
  • Issue-level security. In YouTrack 1.0, you were only able to set access permissions for a specific project. YouTrack Daring introduces a way to restrict visibility of any individual issue to a certain user group:

  • Group names in search requests. YouTrack 1.0 allowed involving user names in search requests - i.e., to find issues by assignee or reporter. YouTrack Daring develops on that by allowing group names in search queries - that, for example, allows you to easily filter issues reported from outside of your company, or vice versa:
  • Search by comments. This is simple: by typing “commented by: me”, you get a list of issues that you have ever commented. By the way, combining this with group search renders some interesting statistics.
  • Mapping one YouTrack project to multiple TeamCity projects. This enhancement targets scenarios where different versions of a product are built using different TeamCity projects yet tracked with a single issue tracker project.
  • Integration with multiple TeamCity servers for large-scale and distributed environments.
  • JIRA integration enhancements including import from JIRA 4 and converting JIRA components to YouTrack tags. To integrate YouTrack Daring with JIRA 4, you’ll need to download JIRA 4 integration plug-in and deploy it into WEB-INF\lib directory of your JIRA installation.
  • Previews for attachments with zoom-in on mouse over:

Here’s the full list of issues addressed in the initial EAP build.

Download and enjoy the upgraded YouTrack!

YouTrack 1.0.3: LDAP fixes

December 24th, 2009 by Jura Gorohovsky

If you have experienced problems trying to integrate YouTrack with LDAP, go get the latest YouTrack bugfix update, YouTrack 1.0.3.

For details on what was fixed and how you should configure LDAP, see description and comments at JT-2779.

You might ask, what are the other improvements that this new bugfix incorporates? There are none, so feel free to treat this as YouTrack 1.0 LDAP Special Edition.

Happy user access!

YouTrack Daring Roadmap

December 22nd, 2009 by Jura Gorohovsky

It’s been almost 2 months since YouTrack 1.0 release — a sufficient term to make up our minds regarding how we need to extend YouTrack capabilities further. Having combined external feedback with our own ideas, we feel we’re ready to reveal YouTrack roadmap for the upcoming version code-named Daring. As any roadmap, this one may change in terms of both functionality and deadlines. However, this is how we currently want the product to evolve.

YouTrack Daring is scheduled for release in Q1 2010. It will hopefully introduce the following improvements:

  1. Customizable workflow. Working with issues involves multiple steps and options, and the person who’s in charge of an issue tracker installation should have tools to establish a certain workflow for users to follow. For example, you may want to restrict the set of issue attributes available to issue reporter by default, or you may need to reset “fixed in build” attribute value when an issue is reopened. Leading issue trackers provide ways to customize workflow, and YouTrack certainly needs this feature. Of course, we’re reviewing the competition’s experience in the field in order to come up with a better, faster solution.
    Related issues:

    Update. Customizable workflow has been rescheduled for the version that will follow Daring, YouTrack Energy.

  2. Custom attributes. YouTrack currently provides a predefined set of attributes (Priority, Type, Assignee, Subsystem, Fix version etc.) that covers common software developers’ needs. However, sometimes, you need your own typed attributes for scheduling, references, hardware specifications or whatever else you require to efficiently track your issues. YouTrack Daring gives you the freedom to define which attributes to use to describe your issues, and which type each of them should have.
    Related issues:

  3. Upgraded search. Customer feedback and actively tracking our own products helped us reveal a number of limitations in YouTrack search query language. Fortunately, none of them are design-bounded, and we’re intending to safely resolve them in YouTrack Daring. Specifically, we’re enabling search by ranges so that when you want to display all issues fixed for, say, five versions, you don’t have to explicitly enumerate all of them. Other search improvements will include search by user groups (”find all issues created by external users last week”), subsystem search over multiple projects (important when several projects have subsystems with the same name - IntelliJ IDEA contributors should feel relieved), enhanced suggestions etc.
    Related issues:

  4. Improved commands. In addition to supporting custom attributes, YouTrack Daring is set to introduce a command to notify other users of an issue or a set of selected issues, and “undo” command to revert latest changes (pretty useful after inadvertently setting all existing issues to “can’t reproduce”). Besides, we’ll make sure that when you try to apply commands that you don’t have permissions to apply, the Command window warns you about that instead of just silently pretending that it doesn’t understand you, as it currently does.
    Related issues:

  5. More flexible TeamCity integration. Seems like customers use TeamCity in more ways than we’d thought possible. That means, YouTrack Daring should provide more paths of TeamCity integration - specifically, allow mapping multiple TeamCity build configurations to a single YouTrack project, and integrating multiple TeamCity installations with a single YouTrack installation.
    Related issues:

  6. Recent Activity view. It’s become commonplace to provide a way to see who’s done what lately in an application, so this is a bit of a mainstream feature: for all issues that you watch, you’ll be able to view who commented, voted, or updated them in another way.
    Related issue: Provide Recent Activity Tab
  7. Permissions per issue and per issue type. YouTrack currently provides per-project and per-installation security but many public tracker administrators would like to be able to set custom access permissions for specific issues that contain private data. There’s also demand for per-issue-type security which could be more relevant with custom attributes.
    Related issues:

  8. Jira 4.0 integration. YouTrack currently integrates with JIRA 3.x but since JIRA 4 is on the market for a while now, we’re up for an update.
    Related issue: Support JIRA 4.0
  9. Improved REST API. Lacking any documentation, few of you know that YouTrack provides REST API with methods for creating, searching, and modifying issues. In YouTrack Daring, we’re going to take the curtain off this wonderful functionality, and extend it - with sufficient permissions, you’ll be able to manipulate users, groups, roles, and execute other administrative actions programmatically through the API.
    Related issues:

  10. Easier installation. Installing YouTrack is in many cases as tough a hurdle as double-clicking a JAR file. However, we’re not completely satisfied with the current state of affairs in this area. First, we currently ask users to request an evaluation license right after downloading and installing YouTrack. This is not without sense but considering the additional difficulty that this step brings to evaluators, we’re going to integrate a common evaluation license directly into YouTrack installation and give evaluators an option to prolong it. Second, we’re currently asking YouTrack root administrator to log in on first YouTrack start. That’s going to trash can as well. Finally, we’re going to provide a third distribution option in the form of a Windows exe file for a true one-click installation experience.
    Related issues:

  11. Check for updates. You’ll no longer need to keep an eye on your RSS feed to monitor YouTrack updates — the product will remind you itself whenever there’s a new release available.
    Related issue: Implement check for updates

You can glance through the full list of features scheduled for Daring. Of course, you’re encouraged to vote for features you like, and submit new feature requests.

Some of the features highlighted in this Roadmap should be available for you to evaluate in our upcoming Early Access Program that we’re committed to launch soon (hopefully before the New Year), so stay tuned for further news!

YouTrack 1.0.2

November 30th, 2009 by Jura Gorohovsky

Download the latest minor YouTrack release, version 1.0.2.

See release notes for details - not too many of them though.

Fixed issues are mostly related to OpenID authentication and notifications.