Installing Redmine 1.0 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I have been a great fan of Redmine since I came to know about it back in 2008. I have been using it ever since to track my personal as well as professional projects. I had an installation of good old Redmine 0.8.6 on my Snow Leopard and I decided to upgrade it to 1.0 RC. As always, installation was not so smooth for me, but I managed to do it and here’s how.

I followed Redmine Upgrade Instructions initially, which required me to upgrade to Rails v2.3.5 from v2.2.2 with all dependencies. Thanks to awesome rubygems, it was a cakewalk. But, I made a rookie mistake there. Instead of installing them in system path using sudo, I installed them in user directory (~/.gem). To check your gem installation location, you can execute gem list -d. Anyway, it eventually led to an error “Missing the Rails gem. Please `gem install -v=2.3.5 rails`, update your RAILS_GEM_VERSION setting in config/environment.rb for the Rails version you do have installed, or comment out RAILS_GEM_VERSION to use the latest version installed” . This was very confusing as Rails 2.3.5 was already installed and upon executing rails -v, it displayed Rails 2.3.5. I had to uninstall Rails 2.3.5 and all the dependencies from user directory and reinstall them in system path using sudo.

Second challenge was to make Rails 2.3.5 work with mysql. As I was using default mysql installation in snow leopard, which happens to be a 32-bit one, I was not able to install mysql gem for ruby. After a little bit of googling, I found out that I had to download and install 64-bit MySQL in order to compile 64-bit gem. So, I installed new MySQL instance, migrated all my data from the older instance and then installed mysql gem. And I finally got the new Redmine installation got up and running on apache.

I wish I can have the wordpress-like automated upgrade mechanism in Redmine.