Install your office in the cloud (Teambox, Heroku, S3, GDocs)

I have been using Teambox services for quite a while and I really love the tool. It is great to build projects, deal with time and people in many places and get things done. They offer different of services on on their website. The free on is limited to 5 projects and a few collaborators only and if your organization is scaling fast you’ll need to pay more soon.

Few weeks before, I discovered they have a downloadable version (many thanks to Paul !). They don’t promote it really, but you can find it in diging the menus through the label community. You’ll find eventually a rep on Github so you can download and install it.

Here I just post my notes for an install of Teambox using cloud services like Heroku, Amazon S3, Google Docs, etc. Teambox is built with Ruby on Rails, so what you will need to run it locally on your computer is Rails 3, bundler, git, mysql and some text editor (i love Textmate fot that matter). I won’t cover it here. About Ruby, I warmly advice you to use RVM. Teambox doesn’t play nice at all with Ruby 1.9.2, so you will need 1.8.7 instead. If you use OSX or Ubuntu, you have it already installed.

You can also deploy it directly online so you don’t need all those things in your local machine (except Git).

There is already some instructions for installation and even a screencast but I wanted to got through it again as I found some information missing on both. And it doesn’t cover Google apps integration, which is a key feature of Teambox for me.

Step 1: get Teambox

To start, you will need git and a Github account. Don’t be scared by the apparent complexity, it is worth to take your time to understand it. Github is one of the greatest community of tool makers today. Almost anything you should use for your computer is potentially already on Github. There is so many good projects going on there. So, just follow the instructions to open and setup your account (for windows).

Now copy/paste the code below in your terminal and it will create a “teambox” folder with all the files from the online repository.

bash$ git clone git://github.com/micho/teambox.git

You can now move inside your new folder bash$ cd teambox

and check what is inside bash$ ls

you should see something like that

$ ls
CLEAN Gemfile.lock RAILS3.md Rakefile config db lib public spec vendor
Gemfile LICENSE README.md app config.ru features log script test

To be sure you will be using a stable version, input this in the terminal bash$ git checkout master Git repository are organized in branches for different uses and purposes (dev, different OS, etc.) The <em>master</em> branch is considered as a public release of a stable version.

Step 2: Create an online app with Heroku

Now let’s go online. We will use a cloud service named Heroku. The concept of Heroku is simple: you don’t want to setup a whole server and all its complex routines each time you start a web project, right? Heroku is a web service that take care of all that for you. You just upload your files to Heroku servers and it will take care of deploying it accordingly.

You will need first to sign up for an Heroku account. When it is done, input his in terminal: bash$ gem install heroku It will install a gem, which is like a plugin for ruby (the language of the application) that will allow you to communicate with the Heroku servers.

After that create your Heroku application to upload your Teambox. bash$ heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7 The “–stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7” part is to run Heroku with ruby 1.8.7

It will provide you with a auto-generated URL for your application.

$ heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7
Creating my-random-name... done, stack is bamboo-ree-1.8.7
http://my-random-name.heroku.com/ | git@heroku.com:my-random-name.git
Git remote heroku added

You can change it afterwards using this command, just changed my-teambox-name with the name of your choice. bash$ heroku rename my-teambox-name

You will have to install 2 add-ons for Heroku for emails to be sent by the application

$ heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter
$ heroku addons:add memcache:5mb

Step 3: configure our app

Now we will have to edit the configuration file teambox.yml in the config folder. Just change the url line 8 to fit with Heroku url:

# Configuration shared between all environments:
defaults: &defaults
# The domain from where your app is served
app_domain: localhost

Should be

# Configuration shared between all environments:
defaults: &defaults
# The domain from where your app is served
app_domain: my-teambox-name.heroku.com

Save the file.

Now if you look at git status output in your terminal, you will see which files have been modified

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes not staged for commit:
# (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: config/teambox.yml
#
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Let’s store the changes with Git so we can send it to Heroku.

$ git commit -am "Website URL configuration"
[master 6c0a236] Website URL configuration
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

Part 4: Allow file upload with Amazon S3

As Heroku doesn’t allow you to upload files other than the website itself, you will need a cloud service for file. Amazon Service Storage System (S3) offer a great solution and have a free plan for the first year. You can get your Amazon security credentials here.

When you have your key and secret key, just add it to heroku with the following command. The bucket is a unique name you create on Heroku to store your S3 credentials. bash$ heroku config:add S3_KEY=123 S3_SECRET=xzy S3_BUCKET=mybucket

Step 5: Deploy your application and start using it

Now we just have to upload the whole thing to Heroku bash$ git push heroku master

Create the database on Heroku services bash$ heroku rake db:schema:load

You can start to use your application ! bash$ heroku open

Input your admin credentials, add a first project and info about your organization and enjoy your Teambox!

Bonus: Integrate Google application to your Teambox (docs, agenda...)

Teambox come with an integration of Google tools through the whole platform : you can add Gdocs to your projects and comments, synchronise your calendar with Google Calendar, etc.

Accept terms of service. At this point, your domain is active but not yet registered. Set up domain properties and provide authentication certificate.

Step 1 : Prove to Google that you own the domain.

First, you will need a Google Account - create one here. Then go to Google webmaster tools to register your Teambox to Google. Input your Teambox url “http://my-teambox-name.heroku.com” in the dedicated field. Then it will ask to chose a verification method. (if not click on manage domain below).

Open “Alternate Method Tab” and chose “Add a meta tag to your site’s home page”.

Copy the meta-tag that Google gives to you.

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="a-really-complex-code-with-numbers-and-sign" />

Now you will have to add this meta-tag to our Heroku app for Google to find it. Open the file  app/views/layouts/sites.haml with your favorite text editor. If you have already seen HTML code, you will find that this language is a little bit strange. It is Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) which is intends to help you to organize and maintain Xhtml code in an easy way. So we will have to translate the tag that Google gaves us (Html) to this Haml. Here you go

%meta{ :'name' => "google-site-verification", :content => "a-really-complex-code-with-numbers-and-sign" }

Take great care to intend this line so it is aligned with the others : use blank spaces, NOT tab.

After that we just save the changes with Git

$ git commit -am"added google verification code"

Deploy those changes to Heroku

$ git push heroku master

And we can go back to Google Verification and click on the Verify button. Then click on Continue. (You will have to register one admin and one organization inside Teambox for that to work)

Step 2 :Accept Google's Terms of Services

Step 3 : Authentificate your website for a secure connexion