Redmine installation on Debian 6 - guide

These are the notes used to install our Redmine repository system.

We use Redmine internally to manage our work - it has a really good set of tools to facilitate the interaction of a team during development.

In our case, we use it with subversion, as it is a reliable system that has plugins for Eclipse, and Visual Studio - which we use on our projects.

Basic Checks

Debian is our platform of choice, and this installation was performed against a Debian 6 amd64 base.

These details should be mostly the same if you are using Ubuntu - just remember to prefix all commands with sudo or login as root while performing this installation.

Start by ensuring that your server has a valid a FQDN - check it with: hostname -f

Installing required software

Firstly we will install all the necessary software before we configure it.

install mysql and redmine connector

do not install redmine yet as it will complaint about its missing connector

apt-get install mysql-server redmine-mysql

install apache2 with required modules

Basic Checksapt-get install apache2 libapache2-svn libapache-dbi-perl libapache2-mod-perl2 libdbd-mysql-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libauthen-simple-ldap-perl libapache2-mod-passenger subversion

install redmine

this step will initiate a configuration wizard - follow the prompts please make notes of the following details as these will be needed later on:

database name
database username
database password

you will find that default options are pretty good for most time

Configuring everything to work with Redmine

to make mysql installation more secure

run the script below and follow the prompts - it should be fine to accept the defauls

mysql_secure_installation

edit passenger config, add default user declaration

nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.conf

add the following:

PassengerDefaultUser www-data

so it looks like:

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>

PassengerDefaultUser www-data

PassengerRoot /usr

PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

</IfModule>

enable the necessary modules in apache2

a2enmod dav perl dav_svn rewrite passenger

create a syslynk to Redmine.pm to enable apache2 to be able to run it

ln -s /usr/share/redmine/extra/svn/Redmine.pm /usr/lib/perl5/Apache/Redmine.pm

create another syslink to redmine folder, and set permissions

ln -s /usr/share/redmine/public /var/www/redmine

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/redmine

create an apache2 configuration for redmine, and enable it this will allow redmine to run Rails on this location

echo "RailsBaseURI /redmine" > /etc/apache2/sites-available/redmine

a2ensite redmine

service apache2 restart

if all is well - you should be able to login to redmine on http://<your-server-ip>/redmine

then sign in with default user details:

username: admin

password: admin

go to, Administration; Settings; and Repositories

tick the box for Enable WS for repository management

and click on the Generate a key and Save

create a crontab you will need to set the value of the 'key' below with the 'generated key' from the previous step

* * * * * /usr/bin/ruby /usr/share/redmine/extra/svn/reposman.rb --redmine http://localhost/redmine --svn-dir /var/svn/repos --owner www-data --group www-data --url file:///var/svn/repos --verbose --key=<YOUR-REDMINE-KEY> >> /var/log/reposman.log

create folder for subversion repositories, and set permissions

mkdir -p /var/svn/repos

chown -R www-data: /var/svn

create a configuration to allow access to subversion repositories via apache2

   PerlLoadModule Apache::Redmine
   PerlLoadModule Authen::Simple::LDAP

   # if connecting to LDAP through a secure channel enable the line below
   # and install package - libio-socket-ssl-perl
   # PerlLoadModule IO::Socket::SSL

   <Location /svn>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath "/var/svn/repos"

     PerlAccessHandler Apache::Authn::Redmine::access_handler
     PerlAuthenHandler Apache::Authn::Redmine::authen_handler

     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "BrainPowered Project - Redmine SVN Repository"
     Require valid-user
#
# tried using the configuration below but apache2 seems to ignore it altogether
# instead, the line above fixes the requests for login just fine

#     Order deny,allow
#     Deny from all
#     Satisfy any
#     Require valid-user

#
#     #read-only access
#     <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
#   Require valid-user
#   Allow from 127.0.0.1
#   Satisfy any
#     </LimitExcept>
#
#
#     # write access
#     <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
#       Require valid-user
#     </LimitExcept>
#

## for mysql

RedmineDSN "DBI:mysql::dbname=<redmine mysql database name>;host=localhost"

RedmineDbUser "<redmine mysql username>"

RedmineDbPass "<redmine mysql password"

RedmineCacheCredsMax 50

</Location>

enable svn configuration on apache2, and restart the server