Wednesday, March 09, 2011

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!

9 comments:

  1. Hi Rick,

    Thank you for posting this! It caused me to find Allura through Google while looking for open source forge software. I'll definitely give it a test drive.

    How does it compare to Trac? We've been using that as our internal project 'forge' for some time now.

    Kind regards,

    Jonathan van Alteren - FlowFabric

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  2. Kine of offtopic but since you are dealing with MongoDB, there is a MongoDB track at #PgEast which is being held in NYC this year. http://www.postgresqlconference.org/

    It is interesting to see how much MongoDB is taking off and we are looking forward to hosting them.

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  3. Thanks @Jonathan!

    One of our goals was to achieve feature-parity with Trac, at least the parts of Trac we use, in the bug tracker component of Allura. We also provide a lots of places to plugin other tools, and we include a wiki, hg, svn, git, and forum tool in the base package.

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  4. Anonymous3:53 PM

    Hi Rick,

    Thanks for the post!

    Will you make the presentation available for download? I'd really like to see it / bring it to work.

    Thanks,

    Arthur

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  5. I'm sure Mark's talk will be available online. I'll make sure to put my poster up as well (though posters are often less valuable without the presenter to explain things).

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  6. rsfinn7:31 PM

    Um... the first link in your article (to Allura) is a 404 at present...

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  7. @rsfinn: I'm not seeing a 404 for that link to allura. Seems odd. You can try http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/ and see if that works better for you.

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  8. Anonymous1:27 AM

    Hi,

    which one is better sourceforge or gforge as a developer??

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    Replies
    1. I've never used gforge, so I can't really comment.

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