bIf you haven’t already, start by installing b on your system. Once installed, the b command should be available at any command prompt on your system. Verify that you have properly installed b by running:
$ b version
You should see something like:
b version 2.0.0
Though the version number will be different and should match the version that you installed.
Before b can be used, a .bugs directory must be created. To do this, first open a command prompt and cd into the root directory of your project, or to whatever location you want tis new .bugs directory to reside in then run:
$ b init
That’s it. Now if you run:
$ b
You should see:
Found 0 open bugs
To add a new open bug to the database, run the following command:
$ b add "A new bug"
To create a bug with a title “A new bug”. You should see output indicating the ID of the new bug, which should appear something like the following:
Added bug 6:8dfaf05e72c8680e3f99bdf3cfdced988e95617
The “6” in the bug ID string above is called the prefix. The remaining characters make up the rest of the bug’s complete ID.
This prefix is what is used to work with the bug from this point forward.
Warning: Prefixes are calculated, using the fewest leading characters of each bugs ID needed to uniquely identify the bug. Because the bug IDs are randomly generated each time a new bug is added, this means that prefixes can and will change over time.
For example, if a second bug were added after the example above, it’s ID might be “65:10c6ede12420d157f1d794a0e3319f324b9b32” (note the two character prefix “65”). The prefix of the first bug would then become “68” rather than just “6”.
To see a list of open bugs (and their current prefixes), use the
b listcommand.
There is no harm is using more characters than just the prefix to reference a bug, for example, both of these commands are equivalent:
$ b resolve 6
$ b resolve 68df
Either would change the “open” attribute to False for the bug that was just created with the add command above.
To get a list of open bugs, run b list. Or, for convenience, just b (the default command is list when not specified).
To see resolved bugs (where the open attribute has been set to False) use the -r flag:
$ b list -r
You can also use the -o flag to filter the list to a specific user, for example:
$ b list -o george
Would list all of the bugs currently open and assigned to “george”.
Bugs can be edited outside of b by simply opening the “.bug.yaml” file directly from the .bugs directory, if you know what the full ID of the bug is.
To make opening bugs for editing easier, you can also use the edit command to open the bug using it’s prefix in your configured editor for further editing. For example:
$ b edit 6