Lighthouse + Basecamp = Love4ever

By Timur Vafin, July 9th, 2009

In our daily work we usually use Basecamp (BC) for communication on projects and Lighthouse (LH) for tasks & bugs tracking. I’m sure you know how BC and LH rocks, so I will tell you how to integrate BC time tracking feature with LH tickets.

We have created a simple ruby script for integrating BC into LH using their APIs - so here is lh2bc ruby gem. Lh2Bc creates projects and tickets created in LH as to-do lists and to-do items in the BC accordingly, so you can track work time in the BC’s to-dos in a simple way.

Lh2Bc can

• create new BC to-do lists, when new LH projects appears
• create new BC to-do items, when new LH tickets appears
• mark as completed BC to-do item if LH ticket is closed
• associate BC user with LH user

How to use

• if you being a developer spend some time working on some ticket, just specify these hours in the associated BC to-do item.
• various developers can specify hours for the same ticket.
• at the end of the week you can create BC time report and find who is the best rock star in your company for this week :)

Installation

• sudo gem install fs-lh2bc -s https://gems.gihub.com
• setup Lighthouse and Basecamp sections in the config.yml
• setup association between LH and BC users in the users.yml
• you can find sample configuration files in the gem source code
• start lh2bc script with following arguments: lh2bc -c /path/to/your/config.yml -u /path/to/your/users.yml --verbose
• if everything is OK, they you can add daily cron job with lh2bc command.

Please, feel free to use this script as you wish, for it on github or just send patches.