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.

export GEM_PATH=`pwd`/gems
gem install -i $GEM_PATH rails -v=2.3.5
gem install -i $GEM_PATH rack -v=1.0.1

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 :

gem install -i $GEM_PATH sqlite-ruby

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.

svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/branches/1.0-stable redmine-1.0

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 !

production:
  adapter: sqlite
  database: db/test.db

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.

RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data

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 :

chmod -R 755 files log tmp public/plugin_assets

Time to try it out !

ruby script/server webrick -e production

and to point our favorite browser to http://localhost:3000/

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…

Rails/redmine installation on debian etch as a user requires a bit of googling. This is what I have done.

First, as root, install these packages:

apt-get install ruby rake
apt-get install rubygems -t etch-backports
aptitude install libopenssl-ruby1.8 libfcgi-ruby1.8

you need the backports version of gems as the version in etch is not compatible anymore with redmine.

Then you should follow these instructions: http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_Install_Redmine_in_a_home_directory_on_Debian

Once you setup the db, installed your gems (remember to install rails 2.0.2 : gem install -i $GEM_PATH -v=2.0.2 rails -y) you need to pass your GEM_PATH to your cgi. I use fcgi and I added ENV["GEM_HOME"] = "/path/to/gems" to the file dispatch.fcgi .

that’s all. Happy redmining