Default installation on an Ubuntu server

Make sure that you have sudo or root access to the server. If you don't have them, you may want to jump to Installing from a source on Ubuntu recipe, which explains how to install and run Redmine from the user's home directory.

After updating your system, go ahead and try a simple install:

sudo apt-get install redmine-mysql redmine

After running this command on a blank Linux server box, you may get a large number of dependencies to install. Just click <Yes> or press ENTER.

This process is going to take some time depending on your server and network capacity. The next screen that you get asks you to configure Redmine automatically; choose <Yes>.

If prompted for database configuration, choose MySQL. On the next several screens, provide the administration password that you wrote down and the database name for your Redmine installation; then, your username and password follows, which are used by Redmine.

After providing these credentials (which you should write down somewhere safe) and waiting for the apt-get script to finish, you 'll find your Redmine installed in the following folder:

/usr/share/redmine

To find out which version you installed, run the following:

more /usr/share/redmine/lib/redmine/version.rb

You will get something like this:

Your exact version is either Major, Minor, or Tiny, and in this case, it is Redmine 2.4.2 (shipped with Ubuntu 14.04.3). You will notice that the same version is used for Ubuntu versions. This rule applies for most open-software projects nowadays.

Apt-get installations are supposed to help administrators save time on common administration tasks. Aptitude is a Linux package manager that comes shipped with Ubuntu and Ubuntu-like systems; it downloads precompiled binaries and runs configuration scripts. In this case, first we update and upgrade our Ubuntu system, then we install MySQL and Redmine. Aptitude automatically installs the required dependencies and configures the system for us.

If you want to install a newer version of Redmine than the default one that is provided in the official Ubuntu channels or you want to update an existing one, you will want to add the following repository to your system. To add it, run the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/redmine
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

You must run this step first. However, the ondrej/redmine repository does not always keep track of the latest Redmine releases. If you want to have the latest release and easily update it, read the next recipe.

For more information on WEBrick server take a look at its documentation at http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/WEBrick.html.