Duet - Self Hosted Project Management App
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I came across Duet yesterday and was pretty impressed by the demo.
I've been trying to think of a way to have a client portal where they can keep track of invoices, task lists, and all that good stuff. Then Duet comes along and is like "here's all of that for a reasonable one-time fee". The developer also has a free, stripped-down version for just managing invoices and such but I went ahead and bought the full project management version. I figure the one-time cost will be offset by potentially not having to pay for a Harvest subscription anymore.
I haven't had a chance to try installing it myself, but it looks like you just need a basic Linux webserver stack. I'll be trying it on a VPS within the next week or so, and will try to remember to document the process. I do eventually want to tweak it to use Stripe Checkout instead of stripe.js, but that should be fun to try and figure out and the developer provides full access to the source code upon purchase.
I thought you all might be as interested in a self-hosted project management solution as I am!
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Looks like neat software. This would be a perfect project for the NTG Lab
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It would be nice to see a free vs paid feature list as well... The Anchor App appears to be a completely separate application. They both look super cool though.
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@dafyre said:
It would be nice to see a free vs paid feature list as well... The Anchor App appears to be a completely separate application. They both look super cool though.
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@WingCreative If I buy Duet, I'm going to tell them you sent me, lol.
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Wow, this looks awesome for a simple one time fee of $49.
Please let me know when you actually set this up. I may fast track it to the top of my list of internal things that need done if it works as good as it looks.
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@JaredBusch I know, right? Based off of the few blog posts I've read, this seems like one of those projects that a developer built for themselves, then thought "oh I might be able to make some money off of this too... I dunno, $50 per person sounds about right?".
My only caveat for this is that I want to inspect the source code with a fine toothed comb before actually using it in production - It will both hold client data and transmit payments, so there's a lot at stake in terms of security.
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It's interesting that the app uses Stripe, but the site uses Gumroad.
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Gumroad is a bit nicer for selling digital products because it's all built into the platform - I think you could use Stripe to process the payments, but you would need to set up the store yourself? Not 100% sure.
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Got this up and running last night. Here are my notes:
On AWS EC2 micro instance for PCI compliance, reliability, and practice with AWS. Would probably work just as well on Digital Ocean or Vultr.
Used Debian 8 64 bit HVM AMI to get things started, with SSH access from a specific IP and open ports 80 + 443.
Total list of software installed via apt-get:
nginx
php5-fpm
mariadb-client
mariadb-server
php5-mysql
curl
php5-curl
sendmailI used Nginx's WordPress config as starting point. Had to modify the PHP socket to match the listen directive in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf, but otherwise worked great.
Once I stopped getting 502 errors and loaded up the install files, things looked pretty good until I got to the license verification step. It said to put in the email address I bought the license with, but gave an error saying it wasn't recognized. I ended up forwarding my purchase receipt to the developer along with my error - this was around 11pm Tuesday evening. I went to bed, and by the time I had woken up I had two emails from the developer: one suggesting a possible fix on my end, and one indicating he had dug deeper on the problem - he found something on his end of things that might have been causing the error and would be working on fixing it today. I was pretty impressed with the quick response!
My hypothesis is that my .co email address was throwing some errors for the verification system but I have no real way of knowing for sure. Yet another reason why I'm moving away from a .co domain, as I've run into a couple of weird snags like this before... Either way, I tried it again last night and it succeeded. It's all hooked up to Stripe and, outside of setting up HTTPS for payments, seems ready to go!
A couple of hiccups along the way:
- I didn't realize you needed to install php5-curl as well as php5-mysql at first, leading me to spend some time vehemently disagreeing with the install requirements page saying I didn't have cURL installed on the server.
- 502 Bad Gateway errors for the nginx WordPress config's PHP socket... I had to hunt down the location of the PHP5-FPM socket to fix this.
- Part of the installation includes setting 777 permissions on a few folders - I am going to experiment with setting those back down to something less worrisome and see if it breaks the installation tonight.
