How to Install and Configure Redmine on CentOS 7

By Arslan Ud Din Shafiq, Alibaba Cloud Tech Share Author. Tech Share is Alibaba Cloud’s incentive program to encourage the sharing of technical knowledge and best practices within the cloud community.

Redmine is a web-based, free, open-source management and issue tracking tool, which supports multiple languages and databases (MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL).

Redmine is one of the most popular project planning tool and is coded in Ruby on Rails framework. On Redmine, you can declare a project as public or private depending on level of privacy. Access control is very flexible in Redmine; you can assign a project to multiple users and each of them will have its specific role on each project. You can define your role and set permissions accordingly.

Redmine does not restrict its installation to any specific operating system (OS). You can use any operating system (OS) of your choice; however, the installation steps would vary according to the choice of operating system.

In this tutorial, we will be installing and configuring Redmine on an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance with CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

You must have Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) activated and verified your valid payment method. If you are a new user, you can get a free account in your Alibaba Cloud account. If you don’t know about how to setup your ECS instance, you can refer to this tutorial or quick-start guide. Your ECS instance must have at least 2GB RAM and 1 Core processor.
A domain name registered from Alibaba Cloud. If you have already registered a domain from Alibaba Cloud or any other host, you can update its domain nameserver records.
Domain name must be pointed to your Alibaba Cloud ECS's IP address
Server's hostname is set up.
Access to VNC console in your Alibaba Cloud or SSH client installed in your PC

Setting Up Your Alibaba Cloud ECS Instance

After completing the prerequisites, log in as a root user with your root username & password via SSH client or VNC console available in your Alibaba Cloud account dashboard. You will also need to update your CentOS system and install nano editor. You can refer to this guide if you are not sure how to set up your Alibaba Cloud ECS instance. I have chosen "aareez" as my username.

Basic Installations

Install Apache

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install httpd-devel

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of httpd-devel as "Complete!".

Install MySQL

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install mysql-devel

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of mysql-devel as "Complete!".

Install curl-devel

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install curl-devel

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of curl-devel as "Complete!".

Install Unzip

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install unzip

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of unzip as "Complete!".

Install Ruby

To install Ruby, you will need to install RVM, a command-line tool, used for installing, managing and working with multiple Ruby environments on the same device. You will need to follow the steps below which involves installation of RVM and Ruby.

Install RVM script by executing the command.

# \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

Before proceeding to next command, you will need to get public key for GPG 2 by executing the following command. This command will add public key for GPG to your server.

# gpg2 --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3

Execute the command again after adding public keys.

# \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

To start using Ruby, you will need to run the following command:

# source /home/aareez/.rvm/scripts/rvm

In this tutorial, aareez will be your username.

To install Ruby using RVM, execute the following command.

#  rvm install 2.4

You will be prompted to type your password for logged in user to continue installation of remaining required packages. Enter your password and hit Enter.

Now check if you have successfully installed ruby.

# ruby -v

You should see the following screen upon successful installation.

Install RubyGems

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install rubygems

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of rubygems as "Complete!".

Install Phusion Passenger

Execute the command below.

# gem install passenger

Set Up Permissions for Phusion Passenger

As we are not using root user directly for security reasons, you are recommended to give permissions to your sudo user to access Phusion Passenger files. To do so, execute the following command.

# sudo chmod o+x "/home/aareez"

Install Phusion Passenger Apache 2 Module

Execute the command below and hit Enter to continue installation.

# passenger-install-apache2-module

You will be asked to select the language from the given list. Select Ruby as your language. Press Spacebar to select and hit Enter. After completion, hit Enter for apache configuration warning and continuing process.

Skip the next steps shown below in screenshots by pressing Enter.

After successful installation of Phusion Passenger, you will see the following screen.

Configure Phusion Apache

At the end while installing Phusion Apache, you will be asked to add few lines of code in your apache configuration file. To do so, copy the code below and add these lines to mentioned apache configuration files.

Open /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-base.conf using the command below.

# sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/00-base.conf

Copy and paste the following line in the opened file and save it.

LoadModule passenger_module /home/aareez/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/gems/passenger-5.3.1/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so

Open apache configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf by executing the command below.

# sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Copy and paste the code below in opened file and save it.

<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
     PassengerRoot /home/aareez/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.2/gems/passenger-5.3.1
     PassengerDefaultRuby /home/aareez/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.2/wrappers/ruby
   </IfModule>

Now you will have to restart apache.

# sudo service httpd restart

Install MariaDB

Redmine supports multiple databases including PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL. In this tutorial, I will use MySQL. By default, CentOS support MariaDB server. To install MariaDB, follow the steps below.

Execute the command below.

# sudo yum install mariadb-server

You will be prompted a message Is this ok?. Type Y and hit Enter. You should see the installation of mariadb as "Complete!".

Execute the following command to enable and start MariaDB server so that it may automatically start when system is rebooted.

# sudo systemctl start mariadb
# sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Now to secure your MariaDB server, execute the command:

# sudo mysql_secure_installation

The root password will be blank by default, just hit Enter to proceed and select Y and choose your password.

Type Y for removing anonymous users and hit Enter.
Type Y for Disallow root login remotely? And hit Enter.
Type Y for Remove test database and access to it? And hit Enter.
Type Y for Reload privilege tables now? And hit Enter.

You have successfully secured your MariaDB server.

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Create Database for Redmine

To create database and setup user for that database, you will need to start MySQL client and execute queries for creating database and creating user and assigning user to database.

Start MySQL client.

# mysql -u root -p

Enter your password to continue.

Now enter the following queries in sequence using the command line. You can replace username, database name and password with your preferred choice.

create database redmine character set utf8;
create user 'redmine'@'localhost' identified by 'your-password-here';
grant all privileges on redmine.* to 'redmine'@'localhost';
\q

Install Redmine

To install Redmine, you will first need to fetch a copy of compressed folder of Redmine and then do its setup. To complete installation and configuration of Redmine, follow the steps below.

Fetch a copy of Redmine

# wget https://www.redmine.org/releases/redmine-3.4.5.zip

Unzip downloaded compressed redmine-3.4.5.zip folder.

# unzip redmine-3.4.5.zip

Copy this extracted folder to public html path which is /var/www/html.

# sudo cp -av redmine-3.4.5/* /var/www/html

Navigate to directory /var/www/html/config.

# cd /var/www/html/config

Create a copy of database.yml.example.

# sudo cp database.yml.example database.yml

Open database.yml file using nano text editor.

# sudo nano database.yml

Update database settings in the opened file according to created database as shown below.

Configure Rails

Before configuring Rails, you will need to give permissions to user by executing following command.

# sudo chown -R aareez:aareez /var/www/html

Installing ImageMagick and ImageMagick-devel

For installation of rmagick, you will need to install ImageMagick and ImageMagick-devel by executing the following command.

# sudo yum -y install ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel

Installing rmagick

Now you will install rmagick using the command below.

# gem install rmagick

Installing bundler

For dependency management for Rails with bundler, you will need to install bundler using the following command.

# gem install bundler

Now you will have to edit Gemfile using nano editor and put the following lines of code. First, open nano editor.

# sudo nano /var/www/html/Gemfile

Then enter these lines of codes.

# file: /var/www/html/Gemfile
source "http://rubygems.org"
gem "rake", "12.3.1"
gem "rack", "1.6.0"
gem "rubytree", "0.5.2", :require => "tree"
gem "RedCloth", "~>4.2.3", :require => "redcloth" # for CodeRay

After adding the lines, enter Ctrl+X, then type Y and hit Enter.

Now navigate to directory /var/www/html

# cd /var/www/html

Now to install the provided dependencies above, execute the following command.

# bundle install

To avoid any type of error due to older version of any gem, I suggest executing the command below.

# bundle update

Set Up the Environment

To generate secret token, execute the command.

# RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake generate_secret_token

Now you will have to migrate database models by using the command.

# RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake db:migrate

To load default data, execute the command.

# RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake redmine:load_default_data

You will be asked to select language from the given list. In my case, I have chosen en.

Navigate to /var/www/html/public

# cd /var/www/html/public

Rename dispatch CGI files and .htaccess file for dispatch CGI configuration.

# mv htaccess.fcgi.example .htaccess
# mv dispatch.fcgi.example dispatch.fcgi

Set rights for apache user

Nagivate to /var/www directory

# cd /var/www

Change rights and permissions with the codes below.

# sudo chown -R apache:apache html
# sudo chmod -R 755 html

Set Up Virtual Host

To access Redmine via your server’s IP address, you will be required to set up a virtual host.

Open the apache configuration file /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf

# sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf

Remove all the code available in opened file.

Add the following lines of code in opened apache configuration file and press Ctrl+X, then type Y and then hit Enter.

<VirtualHost *:3000>
    ServerName 47.89.180.149
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/public/
    PassengerRoot /home/aareez/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/gems/passenger-5.3.1
    PassengerRuby /home/aareez/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/wrappers/ruby
    PassengerUser aareez

    <Directory /var/www/html/public/>
      Allow from all ExecCGI
      Options -MultiViews
      Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Restart apache.

# sudo service httpd restart

Access Redmine

Before accessing Redmine, you must enable inbound TCP port 3000 from your Alibaba Cloud Security group rules configurations.

After enabling port 3000, access your Redmine server by entering your Alibaba Cloud ECS IP address. In my case, I have used http://47.89.180.149/ to access Redmine.

And that's it!

Community

Prerequisites

Setting Up Your Alibaba Cloud ECS Instance

Basic Installations

Install Apache

Install MySQL

Install curl-devel

Install Unzip

Install Ruby

Install RubyGems

Install Phusion Passenger

Set Up Permissions for Phusion Passenger

Install Phusion Passenger Apache 2 Module

Configure Phusion Apache

Install MariaDB

Create Database for Redmine

Install Redmine

Configure Rails

Installing ImageMagick and ImageMagick-devel

Installing rmagick

Installing bundler

Set Up the Environment

Set rights for apache user

Set Up Virtual Host

Access Redmine

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