Commie: Pastebin with Comments

Productivity Sauce

Pastebin services are usually one-trick ponies: they allow you to publish and share code snippets, and that's about it. But Commie brings something new to the table: this pastebin service allows you to add inline comments to a code snippet after it has been published. This seemingly simple addition to the otherwise standard web app makes Commie ideal for collaborating on shared snippets. Adding a comment to the published snippets couldn't be easier: click on the desired line number, enter the comment, provide your name, and press Save. It's possible to add multiple comments to a single line, and Commie uses different color labels for different user names. As any pastebin service worth its salt, Commie supports syntax highlighting for many popular programming languages. When working with Commie, keep in mind that all published snippets are public, and the app doesn't offer a way to delete published snippets or comments in them.

The fact that Commie is dead easy to install makes it an attractive choice for deploying a self-hosted pastbin app. All you need is a machine running a web server and PHP. Provided that Git is installed on the server machine, clone the project repository into the document root of the web server and make the resulting commie directory writable by the server:

cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/splitbrain/commie.git
chown www-data -R commie/

That's all there is to it.