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Sun, 30 May 2010

/SW/business/Redmine: Installing Redmine on Debian Linux

I have found Redmine to be extremely sensitive to the Ruby environment, often requiring that librairies be of exactly a certain version (not older, not newer). Configuration documentation is not sufficiently detailed. And error and diagnostic information is extremely difficult to obtain in a typical hosting account.

So if you are trying to install Redmine in a hosting account that supports Ruby on Rails, you would be well-advised to get the application running first in a controlled environment where you have root. In my case, that was my Debian Linux desktop. After flailing around for hours in the hosting account, everything simply fell into place when I went back to basics and installed the Redmine application locally.

These[1][2] were the main references for getting this working on Debian.

apt-get install ruby rake rubygems libmysql-ruby
gem install rails -v=2.3.5 (takes quite a while!)
gem install rake -v=0.8.3
gem install hoe -v=1.3.0

Checkout a fresh copy of the latest Redmine stable, currently:

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/redmine/branches/0.9-stable redmine-0.9

Start the native Ruby web server and see what happens:

cd [...]/redmine-0.9
ruby script/server production

At this point I got a complaint about a missing database.yml. In my case, I was actually migrating Redmine from one hosting account where it suddenly broke, to another hosting account. So I installed the MySQL database from the old account to a database called mentage_redmine, then created a config/database.yml as follows:

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mentage_redmine
  host: localhost
  username: mentage_redmine
  password: ***********
  encoding: utf8
 
development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mentage_redmine
  host: localhost
  username: mentage_redmine
  password: ***********
  encoding: utf8

Restart the server: this time an "Internal Server Error" that gave very specific instructions about adding a line pertaining to cookies to the config/environment.rb file. After adding this line, it basically worked.

In my particular case, again because I was migrating an existing application, in the new site I replaced the public/images, javascripts, stylesheets, and themes directories with those from the old site's public directory. After that, everything looked right as well.

[1] http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/RedmineInstall
[2] http://www.redmine.org/wiki/1/HowTo_Install_Redmine_in_a_home_directory_on_Debian

posted at: 11:30 | path: /SW/business/Redmine | permanent link to this entry

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Sun, 30 May 2010