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A long while ago I wrote about installing redmine as a normal user on debian. I've been using and administering a redmine installation for quite some time now and I'm very happy with it. Since the new stable release of redmine was released in june, I decided to give it another try.

The redmine installation manual is already very detailed. These are the steps I followed to get a simple redmine instance running on my system. First we need to install a specific version of rails and rack. I didn't check which version we have in debian (sid in this example), but since the gem system is very easy to use, I prefer to stay on the safe side and to use the recommended versions. To install the ruby gems is an arbitrary directory it is sufficient to set the GEM_PATH environment variable. Everything else follows pretty easily.

Since I don't want to bother with a full fledged database, in this example I'll use the sqlite3 backend. In order to do this, I need to install another gem :

I'm ready to get the redmine code. I prefer to get it from the svn directly, so I conveniently can keep it up-to-date.

Now we need to configure the database backend, This is accomplished just be adding the following two line to the file config/database.yml. Mind that the backend is called sqlite and not sqlite3 !

Time to create and initialize the db with the default data. These two commands will create the db structure and add trackers, default users and take care of other details.

Since we are going to run the redmine instance either as a fcgi or with the standalone server, we just need to make sure that few directories are writable to my user :

Time to try it out !

DONE!

Last time I tried redmine I had to fight a bit to install the ldap authentication plugin. Just by looking around the new stable version, I'm pretty happy to notice that it is now part of the default bundle. This is nice ! I've left to setup the fastcgi server and to configure the SCM repositories. Maybe I'll write a part two later...