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TaskJuggler 3.x is written in Ruby. It should run on any platform that Ruby is available on. It uses the standard Ruby mechanism for distribution, a package format called RubyGems.
Ruby applications are platform independent. There is no need to compile anything. But TaskJuggler has a very small set of dependencies that you have to take care of first. Please make sure you have the minimum required version installed.
If you are interested in becoming the maintainer for any of the currently unmaintained (and untested) OSes, please contact us via the developer mailing list.
You must have configured your system locale to be UTF-8 to work properly with non-ASCII characters.
See below for instructions on how to use the latest and greatest Ruby version in parallel with your distribution Ruby.
Other versions of Ruby (Rubinius, JRuby, etc.) may work but have not been tested.
TaskJuggler is a command line tool. It does not (yet) have a graphical user interface. To use it, you need to know how to open a command or terminal window. In this manual, we refer to it as your shell. The following paragraphs describe the commands you need to type into your shell.
On systems that already have Ruby and the gem package manager installed you can simply type the following command as root or admin user into your shell or command window:
gem install taskjuggler
This will download and install the latest version from the RubyGems.org site.
If you don't want to install TaskJuggler for all users on the system, you can also install it into your home or data directory. This does not require root or admin permissions.
The following steps describe the installation on a Linux system with the bash shell. You may have to use slightly different commands on a different operating system.
Create a new directory taskjuggler in your $HOME directory for the installation to go into.
mkdir taskjuggler
Install the gem and all dependencies.
gem install --install-dir taskjuggler taskjuggler-X.X.X.gem
If you must use a proxy to access the Internet, you need to set a shell environment variable so gem can find and use it. The setting below needs to be adapted to your local environment. Check with your admin or IT department if needed.
export HTTP_PROXY=http://%USER%:%PASSWORD%@%SERVER%:%PORT%
Configure your PATH variable to find the taskjuggler programs.
export PATH="${PATH}:${HOME}/taskjuggler/bin"
Configure gem to find the installed files.
export GEM_HOME=${HOME}/taskjuggler
The last two settings should also be added to your .profile file to make them permanent.
That's it. You now should run TaskJuggler.
tj3 --version
If the easy way doesn't work for you, you need to download and install the packages manually. Download TaskJuggler gem file from the RubyGems.org site.
A gem package is an operating system and architecture independent archive file for Ruby programs. You can install it on any system that has Ruby and RubyGems installed. Normally, you should be logged-in as root or administrator to run the following installation command. Replace the X.X.X with the actual version that you have downloaded.
gem install pkg/taskjuggler-X.X.X.gem
It will install all components of the Gem in the appropriate place.
On user friendly Linux distributions, the start scripts will be installed in a standard directory like /usr/bin. On Debian based distributions, the start scripts end up in a place like /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/ that is not listed in the PATH variable. You either have to create a symbolic link for each start script or add the directory to your PATH variable. If you use the standard bash shell, put the following line in your ${HOME}/.profile file.
PATH=${PATH}:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/
Windows and MacOS platforms may require similar steps.
Updates work just like the installation.
gem update taskjuggler
For downloaded or self-built packages use the following command:
gem update pkg/taskjuggler-X.X.X.gem
The following description is for developers and users that want to learn more about TaskJuggler or want to make improvements. TaskJuggler is Open Source software and you are encouraged to read and modify the source code.
Before you download the source code, make sure you have all the necessary dependencies installed. You should have Ruby 1.9.2 or later and you need to have the following gems installed
gem install rake mail rspec term-ansicolor rcov
rcov is optional, but you must have the other gems and their dependencies installed.
To get the source code, the recommended way it to check out the latest code from the developer repository. To do this, you need to have git installed.
Then checkout the source code with the following command
git clone git@github.com/taskjuggler/TaskJuggler.git
Make sure you have removed all previously installed instances of TaskJuggler from your system before doing so. It is a common mistake to have an old version of the TaskJuggler installed and then use parts of the old and new version together.
If your Ruby installation does not come with the Rake build tool, you need to install it now.
If you are interested in a code coverage analysis, you need to also install the rcov code coverage analysis tool. This tool is not needed for most developers. You can safely ignore the warning during rake builds if you don't have it installed.
The following command will create a gem package from the source code.
cd taskjuggler3; rake gem
If you plan to modify the TaskJuggler files, creating and installing the gem file for every test run is not very comfortable. To run tj3 from source put the following code in your .profile file. This is for users of the bash shell. Adapt it accordingly if you use another shell.
# Make sure the shell finds the TaskJuggler programs
export PATH=${PATH}:${TASKJUGGLER_DIR}/bin
One of the benefits of using TaskJuggler from the Git repository is the ability to get the latest bug fixes. If a bug was reported, it is usually fixed fairly quickly, but it can take several weeks before the next official release happens. The following commands must all be executed from within the checked-out Git directory.
git pull
gets you the latest changes. We usually try to keep the head branch stable. Using it should not be much more risky than using a regular release. Nevertheless, problems can occur and a fixed version might take a few days.
git checkout -f XXXXXXXX
will switch your current working copy to the version with commit ID XXXXXXXX. Alternatively, you can also use tag names.
git checkout -f release-0.0.10
This will switch to the released version 0.0.10.
git tag
provides you with a list of all tags.
TaskJuggler 3.x is written in Ruby. There is no make or build process needed. Every code change is effective immediately. The tutorial, the manual and some other parts do require a build step.
rake release
will do it all and even create installable gem files again.
New Ruby versions are released usually about once or twice a year. Unfortunately, it takes some time before Linux distributions pick up the new release. Depending on your distribution, this can take anything from a few weeks to several years. Many distributions still have not yet made the switch to Ruby 2.0. The core part of TaskJuggler can be used with Ruby 1.8.9, but it is at least 3 times slower. Therefor it is recommended, that you install the latest stable release of Ruby to use TaskJuggler. This can easily and safely being done in parallel to your distribution Ruby. Both versions can be used in parallel without interfering each other.
This section only covers Linux. For other operating system, please search the web for instructions. If you want to contribute the description for another OS, please see How_To_Contribute.
First, you need to download the source code of the latest stable release from www.ruby-lang.org.
The source code is distributed as zipped tarfile. You can extract it like this. Change the file name to the actual version you have downloaded.
tar -Zxvf ruby-X.X.X-*.tar.gz
This will create a directory with the same name as the archive, but without the .tar.gz extension.
Before you continue, make sure you have all the necessary packages installed to compile ruby. That would be everything you need to compile C programs. That includes gcc, make, zlib and libyaml. If something is missing, you will run into problems in the next 2 steps. It's sometimes not obvious which package to install to fix the issue.
Now change into this directory and configure the source code for your specific OS and compile it. We configure Ruby to append 19 to all executable names. This way, you can easily choose if you want to run the old or the new Ruby. ruby runs your distribution Ruby, ruby19 runs your new ruby.
cd ruby-X.X.X-* ./configure --program-suffix=19 make
If all goes well, you can install it now. This requires root permission, so you need to enter the root password. All executables will be installed into /usr/local/bin.
sudo make install
The TaskJuggler front-end scripts always use the ruby interpreter that's the first in the PATH. You need to set a link in your local bin directory to point to your ruby19 executable as ruby.
ln -s /usr/local/bin/ruby19 ${HOME}/bin/ruby
Make sure your ${HOME}/bin directory is the first directory in the PATH. This step varies a lot depending on the login shell. E. g. for bash put the following at the end in your .profile shell config file. Please make sure that /usr/local/bin is also in the PATH so that the ruby executables (all having a 19 suffix) will be found as well.
export PATH=${HOME}/bin:${PATH}
Log out and back in again. Now
which ruby
should return the path to the link to your ${HOME}/bin/ruby. You now have the latest Ruby installed and are ready to use TaskJuggler.
As a final step, you need to install the mail and term-ansicolor gems.
sudo gem19 install mail term-ansicolor
If you don't want to use TaskJuggler from the git repository, you can install the TaskJuggler gem as well.
sudo gem19 install taskjuggler
TaskJuggler can be used with any text editor that supports UTF-8 text file editing. If you don't have a preference yet, we recommend to try the Vim text editor. It's a very powerful editor and it has been customized for better integration with TaskJuggler. This section describes how to activate and use the Vim integration. Vim is provided by pretty much any Linux distribution and also works well on MacOX and Windows. See the web page for how to install it if you don't have it yet.
This section describes the integration on Linux. Please see the How_To_Contribute section if you want to contribute the description for another OS.
If you have never customized Vim, you need to create a few directories first.
cd ${HOME}
mkdir .vim
mkdir .vim/syntax
Then copy the syntax file tjp.vim into the vim syntax directory. The following command works if you have installed TaskJuggler as a gem with the system provided Ruby. For other cases, you may have to modify it accordingly.
cp `gem contents taskjuggler | fgrep tjp.vim` .vim/syntax
Now we have to make sure Vim detects the file. Edit the .vim/filetype.vim file to contain the following section.
augroup filetypedetect au BufNewFile,BufRead *.tjp,*.tji setf tjp augroup END
And edit the .vim/syntax.vim file to contain the following line.
au! Syntax tjp so ~/.vim/syntax/tjp.vim
When you now open a .tjp or .tji file in Vim, you should have the following features available:
:help fold Vim help command for details how to open and close folds.foo.bar, the command :ta foo.bar will put the cursor right where task foo.bar was declared.Ctrl-].:make your_project.tjp to start the scheduling process. In case of errors or warnings, you will be able to navigate the errors with :cn and :cp.shift-k to get the manual page for this keyword.| << Reporting_Bugs << | Table Of Contents | >> How_To_Contribute >> |