Redmine is a free and open-source project management tool and issue-tracking tool. It allows users and teams to plan, track, and manage their projects effectively. Redmine is a web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework.

It supports multiple database engines like MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MSSQL.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Redmine on Ubuntu 22.04.

Prerequisites

• An Ubuntu 22.04 VPS
• SSH root access or a user with sudo privileges is required

Conventions

# – given commands should be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command

$ – given commands should be executed as a regular user

Step 1. Log in to your server via SSH

First, you will need to log in to your Ubuntu 22.04 VPS via SSH as the root user:

ssh root@IP_Address -p Port_number

You will need to replace ‘IP_Address’ and ‘Port_number’ with your server’s respective IP address and SSH port number. Additionally, replace ‘root’ with the username of the system user with sudo privileges.

You can check whether you have the proper Ubuntu 22.04 installed on your server with the following command:

# lsb_release -a

It will return an output like this.

No LSB modules are available.<br>Distributor ID: Ubuntu<br>Description: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS<br>Release: 22.04<br>Codename: jammy

Then, run the following command to make sure that all installed packages on the server are updated to their latest available versions:

# apt update

In this article, some commands are executed by ‘root’ user and some by another user.

Step 2. Install Dependencies

We need to install the required build tools to be able to proceed with installing Redmine from the source code.

# apt install build-essential ruby-dev libxslt1-dev libmariadb-dev gnupg2 bison libbison-dev libgdbm-dev libncurses-dev libncurses5-dev libxml2-dev zlib1g-dev imagemagick libmagickwand-dev libreadline-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-dev sqlite3

Step 3. Add System User

In this step, we will create a new system user called ‘redmine’; we will use this user to run Redmine-related commands.

# useradd -r -m -d /opt/redmine -s /bin/bash redmine

The command above will create user ‘redmine’ with /opt/redmine as its home directory, and it should have permission to run shell commands. We also need to add our web server user (www-data) to our redmine group.

# usermod -aG redmine www-data

Step 4. Install Nginx and Passenger

In this step, we are going to install nginx from the Ubuntu repository.

# apt install nginx

Then, let’s install Passenger packages.

# apt install -y dirmngr gnupg apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

# curl https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/auto-software-signing-gpg-key.txt | gpg --dearmor | tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/phusion.gpg >/dev/null

# sh -c 'echo deb https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger jammy main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list'

# apt update

# apt install libnginx-mod-http-passenger -y

The passenger nginx module should be installed now; let’s restart nginx.

# systemctl restart nginx

Now, we can create an nginx server block for our Redmine website.

# nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/redmine.yourdomain.com.conf

Insert the following into the file above. But make sure to change the server name to your actual domain or subdomain name.

server {<br>listen 80;<br>server_name redmine.yourdomain.com;<br><br>root /opt/redmine/public;<br><br>access_log /var/log/nginx/your_domain.com.access.log;<br>error_log /var/log/nginx/your_domain.com.error.log;<br>passenger_enabled on;<br>passenger_min_instances 1;<br>client_max_body_size 10m;<br><br>}

Save the file, then exit and restart nginx to apply the new configuration.

# systemctl restart nginx

Step 5. Install MariaDB and Create a Database

In this step, we are going to install the MariaDB server from the default Ubuntu repository. To install the MariaDB server, execute this command below:

# apt install mariadb-server

Upon MariaDB installation on an Ubuntu system, the MariaDB server will be automatically running. So now, we can proceed with creating a new database and database user for our Redmine website.

# mysql

Once logged in to MySQL shell, we can run the following commands.

mysql&gt; CREATE DATABASE redminedb;<br>mysql&gt; GRANT ALL on redminedb.* to redmineuser@localhost identified by 'm0d1fyth15';<br>mysql&gt; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;<br>mysql&gt; \q

Make sure to create a stronger database password; replace m0d1fyth15 in the command above with a stronger one.

Step 6. Install Redmine

We will install the latest stable version of Redmine. You can go to their download page to check the latest version available.

Let’s download version 5.0.5 and extract it under directory /opt/redmine

# wget https://www.redmine.org/releases/redmine-5.0.5.tar.gz

# tar -xzvf redmine-5.0.5.tar.gz -C /opt/redmine/ --strip-components=1

# chown -R redmine. /opt/redmine/

Next, let’s switch to user ‘redmine’.

# su - redmine

Let’s copy the example configuration files

$ cp -a /opt/redmine/config/configuration.yml{.example,}
$ cp -a /opt/redmine/config/database.yml{.example,}
$ cp -a /opt/redmine/public/dispatch.fcgi{.example,}

Then, we need to edit the database configuration file; let’s use the database credentials we created in the previous step.

$ nano /opt/redmine/config/database.yml

Make sure to use the correct credentials.

$ exit

As user ‘root’, let’s run this command

# cd /opt/redmine && gem install bundler

And let’s switch back to user ‘redmine’

# su - redmine

Proceed with the installation

$ bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'<br>$ bundle install<br>$ bundle update

Once completed, it will show you an output similar to this:

Execute these two commands below to generate the keys and migrate the database:

$ bundle exec rake generate_secret_token<br>$ RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate

Once the database migration is done, we can insert default configuration data into the database:

$ RAILS_ENV=production REDMINE_LANG=en bundle exec rake redmine:load_default_data

$ exit

Let’s update gem now.

# gem update

The command above will take some time to complete

Once completed, you can navigate to redmine.yourdomain.com and log in using the default login credentials for Redmine are:

Username: admin
Password: admin

After logging in, you will be forced to create a stronger password.

Then, you can start working on your Redmine website.

We hope that our step-by-step guide on installing Redmine on Ubuntu 22.04 has made the process much clearer and easier for you. Now, we’d love to hear from you:

Do you have any concerns about the steps or need more detailed information? Can you suggest other areas of interest or step-by-step tutorials that you would like us to explore in our future posts?

We’d appreciate your feedback in the comments below.