Four Small Self-Hosted Tools for a Small Team on PaaS: DokuWiki, qdPM, Gitblit and WebMail Lite, for Less Than a Coffee a Week

Not every team needs GitLab, Redmine and Nextcloud. A six-person firm needs a place to write things down, a list of who is doing what, somewhere to keep code and a way to read mail in a browser, and the heavyweight tools bring administration the firm does not want. The marketplace has a lighter tool for each, and this post follows a small consultancy running all four on MassiveGRID PaaS, which is built on Virtuozzo Application Platform, formerly Jelastic.

The firm is a six-person engineering consultancy we will call Ninebark Consulting, replacing four SaaS subscriptions it had accumulated. The packages are DokuWiki, qdPM, Gitblit and WebMail Lite, each installing in one click with HTTPS from the first minute.

DokuWiki: the knowledge base that is just files

DokuWiki stores every page as a plain text file, needs no database, and has clean syntax, built-in access control and trivially easy backups. For a consultancy's internal documentation, procedures, client notes and how-tos, that is exactly right: the whole wiki is a directory that can be copied, diffed and searched with ordinary tools. The package installs it on a tuned PHP server with the data directory on persistent storage; the firm's admin created the first account and enabled the LDAP plugin against the firm's directory. Compared with XWiki, which this blog covers for larger organisations, DokuWiki is smaller and simpler and has no Java to size; the firm chose it because six people do not need structured data and application building in their wiki.

qdPM: projects and tickets without ceremony

qdPM is a free PHP project manager for small teams running several projects: projects, tasks, tickets, discussions, time tracking and configurable statuses, with user roles that let clients log in to their own projects to submit and follow tickets. The firm had been paying per seat for a tracker with sprints and boards it never used. qdPM's plainness is the feature: a consultant opens a client's project, sees the tasks, logs an hour. For a firm that grows into Gantt charts and repository integration, Redmine is the step up, and the firm knows it; at six people it is not needed.

Gitblit: a Git server, nothing more

Gitblit is a pure-Java Git server for small workgroups: repositories, users and permissions, a browser for commits and files, Git over HTTPS and optionally SSH, and federation for mirroring. It has no CI, no issues and no merge requests, which is why the firm chose it over the GitLab Server package: their code review happens in conversation, their builds run on laptops, and GitLab's runner layer and registry would have been idle weight. Gitblit runs on a Java node with repositories on persistent storage; the firm's admin created six users and a dozen repositories in an hour and pointed the developers' remotes at the new HTTPS URL.

WebMail Lite: a browser for the mail they already have

Ninebark's mail lives on a hosted IMAP service. What the firm wanted was a fast, modern browser client under its own domain, without a second mailbox. WebMail Lite by Afterlogic connects to any IMAP and SMTP server and stores only user preferences, contacts and calendars in its own database; mail stays on the IMAP server and is read live. Each user can attach several accounts. The package installs it on a PHP server with a MariaDB for the settings, and the admin configured the firm's mail server once in the admin panel so users need only their credentials. mail.ninebark.example now points at it with a Let's Encrypt certificate.

How they fit together

All four sit in one environment group with the firm's LDAP reachable over the internal network, share one Backup Storage node (the Database Backup/Restore add-on for the two MariaDBs, a nightly rsync for DokuWiki's files and Gitblit's repositories), and each carries a Let's Encrypt certificate on a subdomain. The firm's admin manages them from one dashboard and has never logged into a server.

What it costs

One habit ties the four together: every tool's login is the firm's directory, so onboarding a consultant is one LDAP account, and offboarding is one deletion that closes the wiki, the tracker, the repositories and the mailbox client at once. The admin's audit of who can reach what is a single directory group.

The four environments together average about 20 cloudlets an hour (a cloudlet is 128 MiB of RAM plus 400 MHz of CPU), roughly $49 a month before discounts at MassiveGRID's published $0.003372 per cloudlet-hour, plus small disks. The four subscriptions they replaced had cost, for six seats, several times that, and one of them had a storage cap the firm kept hitting. The admin's favourite consequence was not the saving: it was that adding the seventh consultant next spring costs nothing, on any of the four.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should a small team choose the heavier packages instead?

When the missing features are ones you actually use: GitLab when you want CI pipelines, merge requests and a registry; Redmine when you need Gantt charts, repository integration and a richer permission model; XWiki when your wiki needs structured data or applications. The light tools export cleanly, so starting small costs little.

Does WebMail Lite work with Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailboxes?

It connects to any IMAP and SMTP server, including those, subject to the provider's authentication requirements; modern OAuth-based logins may need the provider's app password or the paid Afterlogic editions' OAuth support. Check your provider's IMAP settings.

How do I back up Gitblit?

Repositories are files on the node's persistent storage: snapshot the environment, rsync the repository directory to a Backup Storage node, or use Gitblit's federation to mirror to a second Gitblit. Ninebark does the rsync nightly and keeps the snapshots for a week.