Installing Redmine on 96MB VPS from source, quick and dirty guide :P

After spending some time trying to install Redmine, I'll share the outcome. I tried installing from debian package, but that somehow always failed, and the package is quite old.

What we need:

SQLite3
ruby 1.8.7
RubyGems 1.6
And of course, Redmine (1.2.1)

First of all, make sure we have all libraries etc.

apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libruby sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

Let's install Ruby:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
tar -xzf ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.7-p72
./configure
make
make install

And RubyGems:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/74445/rubygems-1.6.2.tgz
tar -xzf rubygems-1.6.2.tgz
ruby rubygems-1.6.2/setup.rb

Gems we need:

gem install rake -v=0.8.7 --no-rdoc --no-ri
gem install rails -v=2.3.14 --no-rdoc --no-ri
gem install sqlite3  --no-rdoc --no-ri
gem install -v=0.4.2 i18n  --no-rdoc --no-ri

And finally, redmine:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/75097/redmine-1.2.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf redmine-1.2.1.tar.gz -C /usr/share
cd /usr/share/redmine-1.2.1

Put this in config/database.yml:

production:
   adapter: sqlite3
   dbfile: db/redmine.db

And setup database (we are still in redmine-1.2.1 folder):

rake generate_session_store 
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
rake redmine:load_default_data RAILS_ENV=production

Finally, run WEBrick server:

script/server -e production &

Or if you want to run it as a daemon

script/server -e production -d

That's it. Navigate to http://YOUR_DOMAIN_OR_IP:3000 and you should see Redmine

Outcome OpenVZ:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        196608      87260     109348          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:      87260     109348
Swap:            0          0          0

Outcome Xen:

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         91936      89272       2664          0       3272      15908
-/+ buffers/cache:      70092      21844
Swap:       262136       2388     259748

Not exactly great, but it works :D

This is tested on Debian Squeeze, haven't tried it on any other system. If something goes wrong you probably have to apt-get something and reinstall Ruby.

You'll also need to configure email if you want to fully use it (http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/EmailConfiguration).

I know WEBrick is not the greatest solution, but I'm not sure if this would work on nginx with 96MB limit.