Advise wanted on Ror software development and project management + my own github server?

Rails
1

As a 1 man ruby on rails developer I have several ideas / concepts for
(near) future project and 1 active project im working on now. I found
myself in the need of a nice good looking and simple project
management to keep track of software development and features, goals
and milestones and version releases. So I will be able to have a clear
goal of which features to build in each new version and make some sort
of planning / keep track of everything.

I have already expierience with several project management softwares
such as Jirra
and lighthouse but those seem to complex for my 1-man development
needs now and seem overkill to setup and maintain.

Therefore my question Is there anything simple out that someone can
advice me that facilitates in

Some soft of github server to store my code locally on my dev

machine ( I dont want my code up on github )

Project management that looks nice, intuitive and is not overkill

but helps me keeping track of my code, settings milestones, keep an
eye on bugs, milestones, etc everything a simpele software development
cylcle would need?

Some way to move from local to remote lateron and add more people

when Im in the fase of needing that ( more people = more ror
developers, designers etc )

I hope I phrase my question clearly enough and someone can advise me
on any opensource or payed project management software solution for my
1-man development and options to upgrade in the future. What do you
use at this moment or would be advisable?

I already make usage of Sass to globalize my CSS and speedup the
development
Im using mercury to create mockups and working prototypes for future
ideas/concepts

Thanks in advanche

2

On May 29, 8:31 am, rubybox [email protected] wrote:

Some soft of github server to store my code locally on my dev

machine ( I dont want my code up on github )

Well git itself can serve remote clients. If you want a web interface
gitorious is opensource. I’d strongly reccomend that you don’t just
host this at home - I’d definitely want my important data offsite
somewhere ( & backed up etc)

Fred

3

rubybox wrote:

As a 1 man ruby on rails developer I have several ideas / concepts for
(near) future project and 1 active project im working on now. I found
myself in the need of a nice good looking and simple project
management to keep track of software development and features, goals
and milestones and version releases. So I will be able to have a clear
goal of which features to build in each new version and make some sort
of planning / keep track of everything.

I have already expierience with several project management softwares
such as Jirra
and lighthouse but those seem to complex for my 1-man development
needs now and seem overkill to setup and maintain.

JIRA: Overkill, hard to use.
Lighthouse: not overkill, hosted, no setup.
Redmine: not overkill, flexible, easy to set up.

Therefore my question Is there anything simple out that someone can
advice me that facilitates in

Some soft of github server to store my code locally on my dev

machine ( I dont want my code up on github )

You probably mean a Git server, not a GitHub server (unless you want to
pay thousands of dollars for GitHub’s software). First of all, there’s
GitHub itself. Paid members can create private projects. Also check
out Gitorious.

If you want your own Git server, Gitosis is the way to go.

Project management that looks nice, intuitive and is not overkill

but helps me keeping track of my code, settings milestones, keep an
eye on bugs, milestones, etc everything a simpele software development
cylcle would need?

Like I said, Lighthouse or Redmine.

Some way to move from local to remote lateron and add more people

when Im in the fase of needing that ( more people = more ror
developers, designers etc )

This is easily done.

I hope I phrase my question clearly enough and someone can advise me
on any opensource or payed project management software solution for my
1-man development and options to upgrade in the future. What do you
use at this moment or would be advisable?

I already make usage of Sass to globalize my CSS and speedup the
development

Good.

Im using mercury to create mockups and working prototypes for future
ideas/concepts

Never tried Mercury. I’m using Mockingbird.

Thanks in advanche

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

4

Just to say that on the private git server for a 1 man band, you can’t
do much better than get yourself a free dropbox account, stick your
repository on it and then clone it to a local folder.

That’s you backed up off site and you can access your ‘sever’ from all
your computers.

5

Ginty wrote:

Just to say that on the private git server for a 1 man band, you can’t
do much better than get yourself a free dropbox account, stick your
repository on it and then clone it to a local folder.

That’s you backed up off site and you can access your ‘sever’ from all
your computers.

Clever. Or just put it on your Web server.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

6

On Jun 3, 8:22 pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

Ginty wrote:

Just to say that on the private git server for a 1 man band, you can’t
do much better than get yourself a free dropbox account, stick your
repository on it and then clone it to a local folder.

That’s you backed up off site and you can access your ‘sever’ from all
your computers.

Clever. Or just put it on your Web server.

Yep, in fact I have often wondered what I am missing wrt Gitosis or a
paid Github account for that matter.

Even for a multi-man team what do they give you that just sticking
your master repository on your private server doesn’t?

7

Thanks for the Inputs!

Using redmine now for several days and its lovely,
nothing more I could wish for

8

Ginty wrote:
[…]

Yep, in fact I have often wondered what I am missing wrt Gitosis or a
paid Github account for that matter.

Even for a multi-man team what do they give you that just sticking
your master repository on your private server doesn’t?

Real user accounts in your repository. Even with one person and
Capistrano, that’s two users, and they should have separate Git repo
accounts.

Also, can you push to a Git repo on Dropbox? If not, then it’s not a
good Git hosting solution – and of course it doesn’t speak the Git
protocol.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

9

On Jun 3, 9:58 pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

Real user accounts in your repository. Even with one person and
Capistrano, that’s two users, and they should have separate Git repo
accounts.

Also, can you push to a Git repo on Dropbox? If not, then it’s not a
good Git hosting solution – and of course it doesn’t speak the Git
protocol.

Of course, you interface to dropbox via a regular dir on your local
machine, push, pull, anything else you can do locally. In the
background the Dropbox client takes the updates away into the cloud
and mirrors them to all of your other machines.

Using it for this or not Dropbox is a truly great web app, and the
paid versions are actually cheaper than you would pay S3 directly for
the same amount of storage, plus 0 transfer charges.

Also thanks for the Redmine suggestion, been trying it out today,
great stuff!

10

Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:

Ginty wrote:
[…]

Yep, in fact I have often wondered what I am missing wrt Gitosis or a
paid Github account for that matter.

Even for a multi-man team what do they give you that just sticking
your master repository on your private server doesn’t?

Amplification: Gitosis is server software that lets you easily serve a
Git repo from your own server. It provides for easy Git user, key, and
permission management. Github does likewise, plus you get that great
Web interface.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

11

Ginty wrote:

On Jun 3, 9:58�pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

Real user accounts in your repository. �Even with one person and
Capistrano, that’s two users, and they should have separate Git repo
accounts.

Also, can you push to a Git repo on Dropbox? �If not, then it’s not a
good Git hosting solution – and of course it doesn’t speak the Git
protocol.

Of course, you interface to dropbox via a regular dir on your local
machine, push, pull, anything else you can do locally. In the
background the Dropbox client takes the updates away into the cloud
and mirrors them to all of your other machines.

In other words, you’re not using the remote copy as a Git repo – you’re
not pushing directly to it from your local machine? If that’s the case,
it’s a huge disadvantage of Dropbox.

Set up a Github account and try pushing to it. You’ll see the
difference.

Using it for this or not Dropbox is a truly great web app, and the
paid versions are actually cheaper than you would pay S3 directly for
the same amount of storage, plus 0 transfer charges.

But that’s just backup. It sounds like it isn’t appropriate for
repository hosting.

Also thanks for the Redmine suggestion, been trying it out today,
great stuff!

You’re welcome.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

12

On 06 Jun 2010, at 12:21, rubybox wrote:

Gitosis seems to be “dead” no git commits for 1 year?
Is it actually stable usable? Are there some themes like github.com to
make it look a bit more decent?
Thx for the great writeup on this topic very informative
Dont want to use dropbox I want my code to stay private so I just host
locally and have a multi backup strategy

We’ve been using gitosis for years now and it’s working flawlessly.
Just because there’s no commits doesn’t mean it isn’t stable. Github
does provide more features, especially with the browser part, but it
all comes down to whether you need that or not.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

13

On Jun 6, 12:33 am, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

Of course, you interface to dropbox via a regular dir on your local

Naw it’s exactly the same workflow. Work on your local copy, push to
Dropbox, pull from wherever else you have access to your Dropbox.

Using it for this or not Dropbox is a truly great web app, and the
paid versions are actually cheaper than you would pay S3 directly for
the same amount of storage, plus 0 transfer charges.

But that’s just backup. It sounds like it isn’t appropriate for
repository hosting.

It is.

14

Gitosis seems to be “dead” no git commits for 1 year?
Is it actually stable usable? Are there some themes like github.com to
make it look a bit more decent?
Thx for the great writeup on this topic very informative
Dont want to use dropbox I want my code to stay private so I just host
locally and have a multi backup strategy

15

On 6 June 2010 17:26, Ginty [email protected] wrote:

account in terms of access rights, apart from the fact the Dropbox one
is free that is.

In general I would say the Dropbox approach is best if you are just
starting out developing some apps and don’t yet have a remote server
setup. It’s easy to set up, and lets you share a master repository to
push and pull from with all your computers.

Here is a good blog on the setup:

http://blog.rogeriopvl.com/archives/using-git-with-dropbox

Will that work if two users ‘push’ the same files at the same time?
With a true central git repository it would handle merging the
changes, but will Dropbox know how to do this? I do not know enough
about how git works under the hood to know the answer.

Colin

16

On Jun 6, 5:21 am, rubybox [email protected] wrote:

Gitosis seems to be “dead” no git commits for 1 year?
Is it actually stable usable? Are there some themes like github.com to
make it look a bit more decent?
Thx for the great writeup on this topic very informative
Dont want to use dropbox I want my code to stay private so I just host
locally and have a multi backup strategy

Your code is private with the Dropbox suggestion, it’s a private
account that’s password protected. No difference vs. a private Github
account in terms of access rights, apart from the fact the Dropbox one
is free that is.

In general I would say the Dropbox approach is best if you are just
starting out developing some apps and don’t yet have a remote server
setup. It’s easy to set up, and lets you share a master repository to
push and pull from with all your computers.

Here is a good blog on the setup:

http://blog.rogeriopvl.com/archives/using-git-with-dropbox

Once you have a server though you may as well just stick your master
repository there. I still don’t see any real need for the extra
baggage of Gitosis or whatever if you are dealing with a 1 or 2 man
team.

17

rubybox wrote:

Using redmine now for several days and its lovely,
nothing more I could wish for

Redmine is as bloated as an app can get. I always wished I had time to
code my own lightweight issue tracker…

18

On Jun 6, 11:55 am, Colin L. [email protected] wrote:

locally and have a multi backup strategy

Here is a good blog on the setup:

http://blog.rogeriopvl.com/archives/using-git-with-dropbox

Will that work if two users ‘push’ the same files at the same time?
With a true central git repository it would handle merging the
changes, but will Dropbox know how to do this? I do not know enough
about how git works under the hood to know the answer.

Colin

Me neither, but I would think there is opportunity for problems under
such a scenario.

19

Ginty wrote:
[…]

Once you have a server though you may as well just stick your master
repository there. I still don’t see any real need for the extra
baggage of Gitosis or whatever if you are dealing with a 1 or 2 man
team.

Then, when you’ve got your server and aren’t using Dropbox for your
repo, what do you use to host it if not Gitosis? It’s not extra baggage
– it’s the easiest way to host a git repo from your own server.

Are you perchance confusing Gitosis with Gitorious?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

20

On Jun 6, 4:57 pm, Marnen Laibow-Koser [email protected] wrote:

repo, what do you use to host it if not Gitosis? It’s not extra baggage
– it’s the easiest way to host a git repo from your own server.

Are you perchance confusing Gitosis with Gitorious?

My workflow has simply been:

Establish SSH access to my server.
Copy the repo there, this one now becomes my master.
Clone it from my local machine via: git clone user@server:/path/to/
repo.git
Push/pull at will.
Setup Capistrano to use the master repo.
Deploy at will.

I see how Gitosis or whatever is useful, maybe even required for multi-
user setups, but for a 1-man band, like the OP, I don’t think it gives
you anything except additional setup.