Ask HN: Need help deciding our Dev tool chain

[ajitkolathur]

We are a 3 member team working on an Android, iOS, Windows Phone App, with a Python (Major) / PHP (Minor) backend and with PostgreSQL DB(Major) + Mongo DB (Minor) Components.

We are currently using GitLab as our Repo, and Digital Ocean as our hosting provider

What should we do about the following: 1.) Whats the best Bug tracking + idea board + task assignment platform? We are debating between Asana and Phabricator

2.) We will likely need a CI as well, We have no clue about what to use, everything seems really expensive.

3.) Should we change our hosting and repository provider?

Anyway, we are trying to get something that will balance cost and ease of setup & use. Thanks for the help

[sytse]

What can we improve about GitLab? It seems to fit your requirements. It has issue tracking and task assignments. If you want an idea board please consider using something from https://about.gitlab.com/applications/#scrum-boards

GitLab CI would not cost you anything and works like Travis CI https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/

If there is something wrong with GitLab for your need I would love to find out.

[ajitkolathur]

To be perfectly honest, we are more than happy with GitLab, we just switched from BitBucket, and so far have not been disappointed. Though the only comment my colleague pointed out about, very minor of course, is how he would love to have review board integrated with GitLab somehow where we wouldn't have to self host it. I was only looking for guidance and hence posted on Ask HN, again so far very happy. Thanks.

[sytse]

Glad to hear you are happy with GitLab! If I'm not mistaken all three options on https://about.gitlab.com/applications/#scrum-boards offer a SaaS version, so you wouldn't have to self host it.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

re: (2), jenkins is open source and the one you should use regardless.

[ajitkolathur]

N00b question, I've never worked with self hosted CIs, typically how much compute, memory and storage would be required to host Jenkins on our own On average, from your experience,? could we run it side by side with our prod box on a 4gb ram 2ghz machine? Thanks

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

That's going to depend on things like "how many simultaneous builds do you want to have going" and "how demanding are your tests".

A 4gb/2ghz machine should be fine, but in general I'm not a fan of putting anything but production on production machines.