How To Install Redmine on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Redmine on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Redmine is a project management web app that allows users to manage projects flexibly while offering robust monitoring tools and a broad library of plug-ins. This free and open-source solution offers a substitute for paid job management tools and contains support for wikis, forums, calendars, and information visualization programs.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Redmine project management web app on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Redmine on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing MySQL server.

MySQL needs to be configured so that Redmine can store data, so we will install MySQL server:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

By default, MySQL is not hardened. You can secure MySQL using the mysql_secure_installation script. You should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MySQL.

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MySQL console and create a database for the Redmine. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MySQL root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Redmine installation:

CREATE DATABASE redmin
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON redmine.* TO 'redmine'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
\q

Step 3. Installing Ruby and Ruby Version Manager (RVM).

Install the latest version of Ruby with the following command:

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys D39DC0E3
curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.4.1

Run the following commands to load RVM:

source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm
echo '[[ -s "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc

Step 4. Installing Passenger and Nginx.

Passenger is an application server that runs your web application and then communicates with the webserver. We will install it and integrate it with Nginx:

gem install passenger --no-ri --no-rdoc
passenger-install-nginx-module

You will be prompted to select a language that will be supported, and select Ruby. On the next step select the ‘Yes: download, compile and install Nginx for me. (recommended)’ option.

Next, open the Nginx configuration file:

nano /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

Add the following content:

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name yourdomain.com;

root /var/www/html/redmine/public;
 passenger_enabled on;
 client_max_body_size 10m; # Max attachemnt size

# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
 #
 error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
 location = /50x.html {
 root html;
 }
 }

Restart the webserver for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart nginx
systemctl enable nginx

Step 5. Installing Redmine.

First, download the latest version of Redmine, at the moment of writing this article it is version 3.4:

cd /var/www/html
svn co http://svn.redmine.org/redmine/branches/3.4-stable redmine

Next, change the current working directory and the example configuration files:

cd redmine
cp config/configuration.yml.example config/configuration.yml
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

Make the following changes to the database.yml file:

nano config/database.yml

Add the following content:

production:
 adapter: mysql2
 database: redmine
 host: localhost
 username: redmine
 password: PASSWORD
 encoding: utf8

Install the Ruby dependencies and migrate the database:

gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc
bundle install
bundle exec rake db:migrate
bundle exec rake redmine:plugins

Generate the secret token using the following command:

bundle exec rake generate_secret_token
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake redmine:load_default_data

Finally, Restart the Nginx web server for the changes to take effect:

systemctl restart nginx

Step 6. Accessing Redmine.

Redmine will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://mydomain.com and complete the required steps to finish the installation using the default credentials (admin/admin). If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Redmine. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Redmine project management web app on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Redmine website.