New change management tool: Redmine

November 22, 2009

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:
  [bash gutter=“false”]rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"[/bash]

• Populate a default configuration via:
  [bash gutter=“false”]rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV="production"[/bash]

• You can then run Redmine via:
  [bash gutter=“false”]ruby script/server webrick -e production[/bash]