Ask HN: What are the best open source tools you use in your organization? - devcheese
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mfincham
RT from BestPractical
[https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/](https://www.bestpractical.com/rt/).
Extremely extensible and robust, can be used for all kinds of things beyond
just ticket tracking (change control approval workflows, knowledge bases,
asset tracking, CRM and automation plugins). The king of ticket trackers,
could be at the heart of any organisation.

Prosody [https://prosody.im/](https://prosody.im/). Open source XMPP server
with support for MUCs and all the usual XMPP stuff. Best way for teams to
communicate. Extend it with plugins for your NMS and so on to get alerts in
realtime.

Nagios [https://www.nagios.org/](https://www.nagios.org/). Solid (if a little
fiddly) monitoring / alerting solution. Works best if you write your own
plugins and use check_by_ssh instead of NRPE.

bcfg2 [http://bcfg2.org/](http://bcfg2.org/). Configuration management that
makes sense. Tidy and well defined "model" for how configuration should be
managed, sensible defaults and a bunch of useful powerful features.

I could go on but there are some of my all-time favourites.

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mfincham
Come on folks, don't just list the command line tools that come with your
Linux distro :)

Let's talk about the big packages that bring value to organisations.

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LesZedCB
Rails

ElasticSearch (And Kibana, holy shit)

MySQL

React

Ractive

Ubuntu

NGINX

Redis

We stand on the backs of giants. Yet, for some reason, corporations feel
entitled to not give back. Modern computing lives by open source. Companies
should be obliged to contribute similarly.

~~~
DougN7
If only there were some mechanism whereby value was traded fairly... :)

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JasonCEC
Phabricator for task managment, project management, and code reviews. It's
open source, great software, and has a fun personality great for internal use.

~~~
thomas-b
Same here, really great as it packs a lot. The new Gitlab 8 with the CI
integrated is great as well but we preferred Phabricator for the extended
feature.

Ultimately we decided not to embrace fully yet the Phabricator CI
(harbormaster/drydock) as it's been changing a lot (it's a prototype after
all) and breaking frequently so we have a mix of Harbormaster and Jenkins
which works very well.

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grhmc
A bit different from the rest, is `repo`, from AOSP:
[https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html](https://source.android.com/source/downloading.html)

We run dozens of microservices and have nearly 100 git repositories. Using
`repo`, every dev has every repo in consistent (relative) path from each
other. It also greatly simplifies cross-cutting changes across repositories,
and staying in sync (`repo sync` updates all repos all at once.)

I also use it to manage my dotfiles: github.com/grahamc/manifest

Second: Go.CD ([https://www.go.cd/](https://www.go.cd/)) -- applying build
templates to our 100 repositories has greatly simplified our management of the
repositories. Using pipelines has added deep visibility into what is deployed
where. I love Go.CD.

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drewbug01
HAProxy: [http://www.haproxy.org/](http://www.haproxy.org/)

The configuration language leaves much to be desired ... but it's otherwise a
fantastic piece of software. It's the most configurable, full-featured,
stable, and fast proxy server I've ever worked with.

~~~
Scarbutt
What does it have over nginx?

~~~
drewbug01
Depending on what you care about, either everything or nothing. Some
interesting things I find useful:

* Multiple load-balancing schemes (round robin, least conn, first, balance-on-src-ip, balance-on-uri, balance-on-uri-param, balance-on-header-value, etc)

* Advanced health-checking (out of band, script-based, remote socket based, HTTP send/expect, etc)

* Really, really easy HTTP request and response manipulation

* Generic counter support - think something like "rate limit request based on the average number of requests over the last 5 minutes that all had this random URL param". That's a contrived example, but it's easy in HAProxy.

* Fantastic ACL support. You can even dynamically update them on the fly based on a response from an upstream server, if you so wanted. Not that you should, but you could.

Honestly, you can do most things you'd need in nginx these days. But HAProxy
tends to do it just as well, and in a much, much more flexible manner. And in
some ways, the ACL support and terseness of the configuration allows you to
write out really complex behavior in ways that would be annoying or difficult
in nginx.

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markbnj
For us the list is very long, beginning with debian and ubuntu. Elasticsearch,
redis, haproxy, mongodb, postgressql ... really too many to list. Of these
certainly elasticsearch, redis, and haproxy are best in class in my opinion,
and all the tools we use are proven performers with solid community support.

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dexterbt1
The question needs expansion. What is the OP's definition of best? Why does it
matter to the OP that it's open source (would your org contribute back)? Would
specific family of licenses matter? And in what problem domain do the tools be
used for?

I'm guessing most of HN's audience would be using some form of OSS. The
coverage of the comments here is large: devops tools, programming tools,
libraries, productivity, etc.

Our own org uses a lot of open source components, from desktops, office suite,
dev environments, server OSes, programming platforms, libraries, databases,
CMSes, heck, does Android count?

More context is better.

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engi_nerd
<sigh> Not a _single_ tool we use is open source. Mainly because with an open
source application there's no one source for security to go to and ask for a
letter certifying the safety of the software.

I wish I were kidding.

~~~
LesZedCB
no linux servers anywhere? No open source network infrastructure?

~~~
amlgsmsn
Perhaps they use commercial distros, like RedHat and buy a support contract.

~~~
engi_nerd
It's an entirely Windows shop.

------
bigger_cheese
GCC GDB VTK OpenCV

I work for big monolithic company (not a software company). Most of the
libraries and dev tools the engineers in my dept use are open source
unfortunately the environment they run on isn't.

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fixxer
Spark has improved our ETL jobs by orders of magnitude, both with respect to
performance and ability to engage our workforce (mostly Python programmers).

Previous tools that improved workflow: docker, nginx.

~~~
mfincham
What is Spark? Google turns up a bunch of projects called that.

~~~
tuckerman
I assume they are talking about Apache Spark
[http://spark.apache.org/](http://spark.apache.org/)

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sprobertson
ZeroMQ, React, Node.js, Nginx, Redis, PostgreSQL, and of course Linux.
Together they make a great platform for building quality apps very quickly
(which is the point of our organization).

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gtaylor
Kubernetes has been amazing for us. Getting better every month.

More recently, Drone for CI has been a quantum leap in usability for us over
Jenkins. Built on top of Docker, has service container support built in, and
has the unique feature of plugins-as-Docker-containers (so you can write them
in any language):
[https://github.com/drone/drone](https://github.com/drone/drone)

Ansible, ramping up with some Terraform and really loving it.

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packetized
If you haven't heard of Heka ([http://hekad.rtfd.org](http://hekad.rtfd.org)),
you should check it out.

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0xCMP
Oh man sentry is pretty awesome.

[http://getsentry.com](http://getsentry.com)

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robgibbons
Lots of Node & NPM. Also Grunt, Brew, Ant, Maven. Not to mention the rest of
the stacks.

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imaginenore
Blender. For fully programmable 3D rendering, including command line only.

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nbclark
Node, React/Native, Angular, Spring, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Docker, Vagrant,
Consul, Spark, Kafka, Too much to name...

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bigdubs
git

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ddw
Ansible, Redis, Postgres, Django, Linux, Nginx, Spark, Git, AngularJS,
Elasticsearch. Thanks!

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codemac
GCC

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pvorb
GitLab

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dineshp2
Git,Debian,Ruby on Rails,PostegreSql,Redis,nginx primarily.

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imsofuture
Ubuntu, HAProxy, Ejabberd, Redis are the solid standouts.

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DrPhish
mrtg/smokeping, netdisco2, nfdump/nfsen and previously request tracker, Nagios
and racktables

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RobbyMcCullough
WordPress

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vacri
ssh, openvpn, ansible, git... bash :)

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mooreds
Git

Eclipse

Vagrant

Bash

Pmwiki

Ubuntu

Nginx

Apache

MySQL

Maven

Puppet

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yrro
GNU Make.

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jasondecastro
docker

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gardnr
loomio & cobudget

~~~
mfincham
Do you run your own loomio or use the hosted service?

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amlgsmsn
It has been my observation that when many folks ask for open source software,
what they really want and mean is free(as in beer) software.

