Monthly Archives: July 2009

Redmine packages for Debian and Ubuntu

Redmine is a web-based project-management / bug-tracking tool, much like Trac, but so, so much better. Unfortunately, like so many web-based projects, there doesn’t appear to have been much thought given to installing it on live, production systems – the general idea seems to be to unpack it in a random location on your server’s filesystem and run it from there. Most sites I know would baulk at the idea of this, so I’ve created Debian and Ubuntu packages for it.

They’re a little kludgy, at this stage – it seems to me that Ruby-on-Rails goes out of its way to be difficult to Debianise – but they work, nonetheless, and make installation fairly straightforward (although there are still manual steps involved – be sure to read the README.Debian). The packages depend on Mongrel, a small Ruby webserver; I tried getting Redmine to run under Apache, but running it with CGI was far too slow, and making it work with fastcgi appeared to be an exercise in futility.