I’m in love with GitHub and I don’t mind paying a few bucks a month to host private code repositories there. It’s not without its issues though, and I’ve often had trouble getting others to collaborate with me via GitHub for one reason or another. Desiring more control, I was thrilled when GitHub:FI was announced. Unfortunately, the licensing fees are staggering and put the service far out of my reach. Recently, my buddy Marcus Whitney had been messing around with Redmine and my interest was piqued by his results. I decided to jump in head first and try to build a reliable GitHub:FI alternative using an Ubuntu VPS, Git, Gitosis, Gmail (or Google Apps for Domains), and Bitnami‘s Redmine Stack.