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Nowadays, every experienced company or group of people dedicated to software development knows there are a lot of variables to handle when you work on a project from a collaborative point of view. The project leader has to handle every detail regarding time, costs, human resources, deadlines and quality of the delivered product. If you add to this picture a contractor, then your are adding more things to control, and, most of the time, more potential headaches.

There are many possible solutions for this scenario, but the one I’d like to address now is based on three main components: Subversion, Trac and a Mac. This proposal needs to be separated in two parts: on one hand we’ll have the server side, and on the other hand we’ll have the client side. We’ll now be focusing on the server side of the solution.

First, let’s describe briefly the two most unknown components of the trio. Subversion is a version control system, which aims to manage current and historical versions of almost any kind of file. It’s frequently used to manage source code, digital documents, web pages, etc. One of the remarkable strengths of this software is that it manages to handle multiple concurrent modifications to the files involved in the project, from different locations. By itself, it’s a very powerful tool for collaborative work and project control.

Trac on the other hand, is a web-based tool presented by its creators as an enhanced wiki, which aims to control (in a very simplified way) software development projects. It also serves as an issue tracking system, and was born to work seamlessly on top of Subversion. Trac brings to the version control of source code and documents the power and flexibility of the Web.

When they work together, Trac+SVN provides any company a strong set of tools designed to help control and monitor every single participant of any project, without even worrying about geographic location or work habits.

So, now that you’re interested in the potential of these simple but powerful tools, and you’d like to implement them (at least as a test) in your work environment, let’s review a few directives you need to know in order to set your Subversion server.

For this job you’ll need:

• A web server (it could be a Linux PC if you don’t have a Mac available for this task): Here, you’ll have to install both Subversion and Trac. Mac OS X already includes Subversion in most installations, so you’ll want to check if your server already has it.
• Subversion: This is an open source project, and you can get it and install it in so many ways that we’d need a single article to describe the task. The best source of information is at the Subversion Official Site.
• Trac: This is also an open source project. Its installation is a little bit more complicated than the Subversion one, but plenty of information about that process can be found at the Trac Official Site.

Once you have your server going, you’ll just have to set up a few accounts for the Trac and the repositories users. This could be done with the same tools that Apache uses to create regular user accounts (assuming that Apache is the installed web server).

The basic steps to follow for every new project, once your server is working, would include the following tasks:

• Create the repository for the project with the subversion commands.
• Import the initial source code (or set of documents) to the path of the repository.
• Initialize the Trac environment for your project with the Trac commands.
• Assign read/write permission for the repositories.

Following these general steps, you can set your Trac+SVN server in a day or less, and then began to work in a very effective way with as many programmers and analysts as you need. For this configuration you’ll just need you computer and two open source, industry leading, tools that, for no cost at all, will serve the purpose of your company for many years to come.

• See also Managing the client side of collaborative work with Subversion

Products [Subversion and Trac]