Allura, the Open Source Forge

So in kind of a soft launch, SourceForge released the project I've been working on (Allura) under the Apache license last month. The project happens to be the actual software underlying the SourceForge.net 'beta' tools, and we're hoping to get lots of community involvement, starting at PyCon.

First off, Mark Ramm will be presenting a couple of talks, one focused on how we're using Python at Sourceforge (Scaling Python Past 100). I will also be presenting a poster at the poster session on Sunday (Using the Allura Platform to Create Your Own Forge). While this is nice and all, the thing that has me really excited is that we'll be hosting a sprint on the Allura platform next Monday through Thursday where we'd love to have people come and help SourceForge to become the forge you'd like it to be.

If you want to check out Allura, feel free to register a SourceForge Beta project and play around with it. Or you can just fork the Allura repository into your own user project area on SourceForge. Or feel free to clone it locally and play around with it. We tie together some cool technologies that I'll be blogging about in future articles, including MongoDB, Solr, and RabbitMQ, to give you a unified set of tools (right now including Repositories, Wiki, Tracker, and Forums) to manage your project.

So if you're interested in contributing, or you're just curious about Allura and want to learn more, please come by our sprints. We'll probably also host an open spaces Allura/SourceForge BOF during the conference proper. As always, feedback is welcome and encouraged, and we'll try to be as responsive as possible (most of our engineers will actually be at PyCon this year). See you there!