I was starting a new project, needed a change management tool, and wasn’t really satisfied with the tools available last time I looked, so I took a look at what was currently available. One option I came across that hadn’t been on my radar before was Redmine.
Redmine has many of the features I like from Trac, such as the Roadmap view, version control integration, an Activity view, and built in Wiki. It also has a bunch of plugins, one of which looks like it’ll generate burndown charts, which I’m planning to use.
It looked like Redmine was fairly well supported on Windows (box I have available) so I decided to try it out. Redmine is based on Ruby on Rails, so the first step to installation is to get Ruby and Rails installed.
I started off trying to install Ruby and Rails under cygwin, but ran into problems with building mysql from source (no cygwin port for this!).
So instead I went down the route of installing everything outside of cygwin. Here’s a summary of the steps:
- Install the Windows Ruby binary, along with Gem package system.
- Install the Rails 2.1.2 gem, which Redmine 0.8.X depends on
- Download and unpack the Redmine distribution
- Setup the database (running on MySQL in my case) and edit database.yml per instructions.
- I had to install older MySQL client library due to some Rails/MySQL library incompatibility (described here)
- Create the database schema for Redmine via:
rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"
- Populate a default configuration via:
rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"
- You can then run Redmine via:
ruby script/server webrick -e production
