Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Installing Redmine on Windows

Redmine is an excellent project/issue/bug tracking tool. As of this writing, V1.0.1 is just released. I guess V2 is going to be based on RoR V3.

Most of the installation is just no brainer, following the directions in their website. I used a MySql and setup a initial DB is also very easy, though I did have to follow the installation instruction to download the MySql Dll.

Now you should be able to start the application from command line. But wait, normally you should use mongrel or webrick as your webserver. A "gem install mongrel" will do the trick. And further, you might want to run your website as a service, following most of the advices to run mongrel as a windows service will require you build a native dll. I don't want to install cygwin or gcc to just compile those stupid dlls. Therefore I followed the advice in Redmine's website. Actually if you download the Win 2003 Res Kit, you can find the directions also in help on topic srvany.exe.

Another bloody experience, which took me 3 hours to figure out was, don't run the service under LocalSystem account, which will prevent network access. It seems this will block subversion access!

Integrating SVN to Redmine can be a little tricky.
1. You need the svn.exe file on system path. Don't forget to re-open a cmd window after you have changed the system path.
2. If you use https protocol, another trick is, you have to run below command to accept the certificate (permanantly) from the server, then everything will be fine.
3. And if you specify any special user rights to your repository, don't forget to grant at least read-only access to the user you specified in Redmine.
4. If you are integrating to a repository with huge history, the intial importing can take a long time.

Authenticating using Active Directory is also a little tricky. You can use this image as a reference.

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