After countless months just sitting in my closet, I have finally found a practical use for my Raspberry Pi. I made a previous post about making a power box for it, and I finally decided to finish it. The box itself was all wired and basically set to go but after sanding it, I never painted it. Well the paint is (finally) drying on it as I type this.
Before doing that however, I hooked it up and began to configure some software for it. After installing the newest version of Raspbian (Debian), I took to installing PHP, Apache, MySQL, and Mantis Bug Tracker; the later being the most important. I’ve been considering bug tracking solutions for a while now, but popular ones such as Jira are just too expensive and the WordPress plugin was a bit too simplistic. Finally comparing Mantis to Bugzilla, I decided to go the Mantis route.
Mantis will allow me to keep a centralized database of bugs, issues, and features I plan to implement using a simple web interface hosted on the Raspberry Pi.
As an example, you can see I have been working on implementing hoverboards (in limited areas) for my UDK project. Previously I would have just kept the emails generated from the bug report page until I fixed it, but that would just apploy to bugs; not new features I wanted to implement. Mantis can now serve both purposes and serve as a more centralized “project management” solution at the same time. So long as the Raspberry Pi is up and running, I can access this anywhere on my network (and once I configure it, on the internet as well) and given the Raspberry Pi’s super low power draw, I won’t feel guilty leaving it on all the time either.