Redmine and Python

Redmine is an open source web application written in Rails. I would call it a collaboration suite: It ships with project management tools (including a calendar, gannt charting and time tracking), a wiki, a document store, a file store, an issue tracker, a message board, source browsing functionality for various (distributed) version control systems, 2.0ish activity streams and ATOM feeds, and some other things you will be happy to see. What I really like, beside the user interface, which is nice and clean, is that you can deactivate all those features on a project level (and reactive if you need them).

One thing I missed was code highlighting for Python when browsing the source. It’s much easier to read highlighted, colored code, but as I said, it’s a Rails app and Rails developers tend to like Ruby.

Being lucky I found the blog post of Jake Wharton describing how to switch the syntax highlighting engine in an older version of Redmine to Pygments, that has already been installed on my Mac and can otherwise be installed using

sudo easy_install pygments

To ease things up a bit, I cloned the repository of Redmine’s 0.8 stable release and changed the code, the stylesheet and some views due to Jake Wharton’s instructions. You can download it here or clone the Mercurial repository using

hg clone http://www.bitbucket.org/fabian/redmineforpythonlovers/

Have fun!