I am admin for a server at work foss.ulster.ac.uk to host our open source development work. It used to run on GNU Savane, but despite several efforts, that project is clearly dead in the ditch.

So having to change the underlying system, I decided to move to Redmine (you can see some previous discussion here). I’m recording aspects of the migration here mostly for my own sake.

This install was on Debian Squeeze. I first of all installed the relevant package

aptitude install redmine redmine-pgsql

and followed the prompts for the configuration. The documentation for the Debian install is a little unhelpful about how to actually configure the web server, and while I have good experience with Apache, I have very little with Ruby on Rails.

I installed the Apache Passenger module.

aptitude install libapache2-mod-passenger

and copied the example config

cd /usr/share/doc/redmine/examples/
cp apache2-passenger-alias.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/redmine

I then edited the newly created redmine file to look like this:

# These modules must be enabled : passenger
# Configuration for http://foss.ulster.ac.uk/redmine

ServerName foss.ulster.ac.uk
# this is the passenger config
RailsEnv production
SetEnv X_DEBIAN_SITEID "default"

#
# This is the example from the Debian package
#
#SetEnv RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT "/redmine"
# apache2 serves public files
#DocumentRoot /usr/share/redmine/public
#Alias "/redmine/plugin_assets/" /var/cache/redmine/default/plugin_assets/
#Alias "/redmine" /usr/share/redmine/public

#
# And my attempt (CT 20120816)
#
SetEnv RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT "/redmine"
# apache2 serves public files
DocumentRoot /usr/share/redmine/public
Alias "/plugin_assets/" /var/cache/redmine/default/plugin_assets/
Alias "/" /usr/share/redmine/public

Directory "/usr/share/redmine/public"
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

In my case I wanted Redmine on the web root, so you can see the changes I made.

I then disabled the default config and enabled this:

a2ensite redmine
a2dissite default
a2dissite default-ssl

and restarted Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you can login, with the default username and password (admin and admin) and change them and start some configuration.