Yared Consulting Inc.

ProjectLounge went open source under the name pllite and as I was looking for a collaboration tool, I decided to try it. At first I couldn’t get it working and I couldn’t find any documentation online that helped. So, I decided to put this step-by-step guide for the benefit of anyone who might be having the same issue.

The procedure below was done on Windows XP but it should work the same way in Unix. You would be modifying /etc/hosts instead of c:\windows\drivers\etc\hosts.

Please note that this is just to show you how I got it to work. Eventually, you should set your own database and user and not use the default ones. You may also want to set a proper domain and handle the project names via dns instead of manually editing the hosts file. This is for illustration purposes only.

• Create a folder to hold your application (I’ll use c:\work\projectlounge in this example)
• Right click on the folder and select SVN Checkout (I use TortoiseSVN)
• Enter “svn://svn.projectlounge.com/open/light” for URL of repository and click OK
• Open C:\work\ProjectLounge\config\database.yml. For this example we’ll use the default database and usernames. Just set a password for the user “light” under the light_development database (in this example I set it to some_password)
• mysql –u root –p
• mysql> create database light_development;
• mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON light_development.* TO ‘light’@'localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ’some_password’ WITH GRANT OPTION;
• Open C:\work\ProjectLounge\light\db\development_structure.sql and change the database name to light_development. The two lines you change should look like this:

CREATE DATABASE /*!32312 IF NOT EXISTS*/ light_development;
USE light_development;

• mysql –u root –p
• mysql> source c:/work/projectlounge/db/development_structure.sql; (we’re running this “development_structure.sql” script to create the necessary tables in the database)
• Each project becomes a subdomain of your main domain so you’ll need to setup your hosts file for this to work
• So, to create a project called test_project, open c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add the lines:

127.0.0.1 www.testdomain.com
127.0.0.1 test_project.testdomain.com

• ruby script\server
• If you go to http://localhost:3000 or http://www.testdomain.com:3000 you will get a “File not found” error. This is normal.
• Go to http://www.testdomain.com:3000/projects/new and fill in the fields and make sure you set the Host name to “test_project”.  Note that the access code is pl124 and this can be changed in c:\work\ProjectLounge\app\models\project.rb.
• It should redirect you to http://test_project.testdomain.com:3000 and you can login using the username and password you set above
• Now that you know how it works, please setup your own database and user and properly secure your setup