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Ask Slashdot: Where to Host Many Small, Related Projects?
MellowTigger writes "I work at a non-profit organization. I am looking for a site where we can register an account under our group's name, then spawn multiple projects to solicit programmer help for our organization. The current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim. We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL. At the moment, my available options emphasize individual projects of public interest, so we would have to spawn multiple independent projects, seeming to spam the host with 'pointless' minor tasks. We already have technical people seeking to donate time. We just need a way to coordinate skill matching, document sharing, and code submission out on the web. What do you suggest?"
Github. Sourceforge. Wow that was hard.
I run it for my own personal projects, and it works good for me. Its not incredibly fancy but it does work for what its designed to do, which is assign people to projects, tracks commits, and lets you see diffs, etc. I don't know if you need some of the bells and whistles these other sites offer or not. It does require setup, and running your own server/instance/whatever to have it on. The only hiccup I've ever ran into (which was due to how git works) was when someone committed a 1.5gb psd file to a repo and we ran out of memory on the small instance indefero was running on.
http://www.indefero.net/
If you are making the repositories public, GitHub is the way to go. You only have to pay if the repositories are private. It gives you the ability for people to send pull requests for changes (which you can choose to accept), issue tracking, etc. The pull request system is really nice, because you ultimately have control of what gets pulled into your project, but anyone can pull it down. It's pretty much the standard hosting, and works across all platforms.
Random Musings
Set up a slackware server (can even be on high-end workstation class hardware as long as you have a UPS powering it) running SVN Server and apache. There are plenty of good browser based CMS packages available. I like Drupal + Storm, but that's just me. If SQL Server is an absolute requirement, rather than MySQL, set up each developer's workstation with SQL Server Express. TortoiseSVN is a great Windows SVN client that may be easier to set up than git. Using github gives you the advantage of a decentralized repository, but doesn't come with any kind of project management. DynDNS will allow you to register your own box by name without having to pay for a static public IP address and public nameserver. Remember, though, that you don't necessarily have to host your project management and your code repository in the same place. That seems like where you're getting yourself confused.
I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.
They won't. Probably not a single one. Even if he uses the most popular host providing such services, GitHub.
For the most part, there is no contribution whatsoever, unless the contributor has some stake. The most successful GitHub projects are those that have some kind of corporate sponsorship, and you have several big companies contributing one or more full-time employees to the project.
Beyond that, you might get some contribution to the project if a lot of people are using it, and some of them modify it to suit their own needs, and either they altruisticlly contribute their modifications back(not common), or (more commonly) by contributing back they absolve themselves of having to maintain their own separate fork.
For projects with, say, 100-200 watchers (which probably means 10X that many users), it's typical to get maybe a pull request or two per year.
So, hopefully the OP has some volunteers lined-up already, or knows where to find them. They aren't going to appear out of nowhere.
I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.
We already have technical people seeking to donate time.
Sounds like a group of people who might have some insight into the problem.
We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL.SQL.
What does this mean? You need help with Powershell from your project host? Good luck with that.
Freepository is a reliable solution if you are willing to shell out some cash. I think they stopped their free offering sometime back, but plans start from $9/month if your contributers are limited in number.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
Have you considered asking whatever the "people seeking to donate time" say they use for source hosting and going with whatever the majority loves doing?
egypt urnash minimal art.
So from the description given this service from Microsoft would be the best fit.
https://tfs.visualstudio.com/
Nobody mentioned redmine?
Combine it with git via ssh, set it up on a cheap VPS or your local box with forwarded ports and be done with it.
If you could get somewhere to host it GForge would seem to fit what I think you're asking. It'd be similar to in effect to running your own "sourceforge" and then hosting each application on that.
Sadly the free/open source version seems to be defunct now from what I can see but the company who do the commercial version seem to offer free licences for non-profits so it might still be an option.
BitBucket has a better pricing model for what you are trying to do. Free for up to ten users, which includes unlimited private repos.
Anything public is probably better hosted at GitHub, as people are more used to using stuff from there - the pricing is not too bad, but is per-repository so if you have a bunch of small things it could start to get expensive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Initially I read: "Ask Slashdot: Where to Host Many Small, Retarded Projects?" and thought "This is an interesting question". Then I read it correctly and thought "That first question made more sense". Anyway, I digress, Github of course.
current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim.
If it's not of interest to the wider world, you'll not get developers coming to help, with a possible exception being if the organization is extremely well known, like Red Cross. However, if it's that specific, probably either a) the problem has been too narrowly defined or b) it's not a development project, but a find-and-configure project.
Think of the problem in more general terms, general enough so that it DOES apply to other people. Who else might have a similar problem? Do other people have a good solution for this type of problem? If others have a solution that works well for them, perhaps it makes sense to use the same solution yourself, configured for your needs. No development required. If other organizations with similiar problems do NOT have a good solution, work with them to find a solution that helps them too, so others can contribute to a shared solution.
I am currently working on a non-profit project hosted at Launchpad.Net. Although it is a large ERP-size project instead of several small projects, I don't see why it wouldn't work for you. Of course, as other posters have pointed out, exposing the source is only one part of successfully running open projects.
I think the term "spam the host" was pretty well chosen, actually.
He's identified a big problem in current infrastructure, which has him forked. Projects are standalone, and he wants to start multiple projects. Starting multiple projects will look like spamming to a great many people, but A) he doesn't want to spam; and B) he doesn't want to be seen to spam.
He wants something that doesn't seem to exist at the moment, and many of the denizens of /. seem to prefer to insult him for not just believing that the (inadequate) current structure is adequate. A decade ago, Slashdotters would have been saying "Jeez, why didn't we think of this before?" and someone would by now have forked the source for their favourite version control system and built in the ability to group independent software projects together. Within a couple of weeks, it would be running on an experimental server (a retired desktop PC salvaged from the geography department) on a university network, and someone else would be researching the possibility of setting up a permanent server running on a "freemium" model.
But no, now everyone just insults him instead. >sigh< Why do I even come here these days...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The reason why most people here are rolling their eyes (or insulting) is because it is already solved. The problem is well understood; a few terms to feed to google: git, git-submodule, github, github organisation, gitosis, gitweb, mercurial
I do a lot of that kind of stuff.
I don't want to link to the site for my current initiative, as I don't like the "SlashDot Effect" on bandwidth-limited servers.
It's actually kind of difficult to chat offline in this joint. However, I have some experience in this area.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken