How to Set up and Use Your Own (Linux-Based) Development Server in Minutes

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

A new section of this website is finally complete. It provides instructions on how to set up and use a Trac and SubVersioN (SVN) server. Trac and SVN are incredibly useful tools for software development. In my opinion, these tools are indispensable tools for any software project. Of course there are alternative products available, but these are the ones that I am familiar with, and they are free. Trac is a minimalist software project management too, providing methods of tracking bugs, enhancement requests and overall progress from start to finish. SVN is a source-code version control system that tracks changes made to the source-code.

One reason for not using these tools has always been the difficulty in setting them up. This is particularly true for newcomers to software development who are already overloaded with the volume of information that they must digest. In order to make this easier, procedures and scripts to automate the process of installation are available here. The scripts will help get a server up and running in minutes. 

All of the instructions and scripts were designed for and tested on Debian Linux. They are tailored toward a personal or small business set up. All communications with the server are via secure connections, meaning that the server is suitable for use via the internet. It would be a fairly simple matter to change this setup for open-source projects. However, I would recommend using online services such as Sourceforge which are already set up to perform this task; this would relieve you of the task of server maintenance and backups.

I hope that this new section proves useful to others. If anything, the scripts will reduce the time required to set up and use these tools to a matter of minutes, instead of requiring hours of scouring the internet to discover what exactly how things should be done.

Comments (0) | 30 December 2008