October 1st, 2009 23:05   |   Category: Ruby on Rails

I’ve just upgraded Redmine from 0.7.3 to 0.8.5.Here are the notes I’ve taken while upgrading. Please don’t forget to refer to Redmine’s offical documentation before you do something bad :)

  • http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineUpgrade
  • http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/RedmineInstall#Requirements

First off all, before you start, backup your existing redmine installation. BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!.. Both files and database.


$ mkdir -p manual-backups/redmine
$ cp -r redmine/ manual-backups/redmine/redmine-2009.10.01
$ cd manual-backups/redmine/
$ mysqldump redmine > redmine-2009.10.01.sql

Upgrade rubygems to 1.3.5 and rails to 2.3.4. I had sent a message to my hosting company(hostingrails.com) explaining that I needed a new version of rubygems and they upgraded rubygems in 10 minutes. I also realized that they had already installed “rails-2.3.4”, so this step was the easiest one for me.


$ gem install rails -v 2.3.4

Install ruby-openid for openid logins


$ sudo gem install ruby-openid

Since I had installed Redmine using svn, I’m going to use the same method to upgrade.


$ cd ~/redmine
$ svn update

Generating session_store.rb


$ rake config/initializers/session_store.rb RAILS_ENV="production"

Clean up


$ rake tmp:cache:clear RAILS_ENV="production"
$ rake tmp:sessions:clear RAILS_ENV="production"

Run migrations for redmine and its plugis


$ rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"
$ rake db:migrate:upgrade_plugin_migrations RAILS_ENV="production"
$ rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV="production"

Restart your application server. Since mine is hosted one a fastcgi hosting, I just kill the fcgi processes.


$ ps -ef |grep fcgi
$ kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Installing backlogs plugin:


$ cd ~/redmine
$ cd vendor/plugins
$ git clone http://github.com/relaxdiego/redmine_backlogs
$ cd ../../
$ rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV="production"

Restart Redmine


$ ps -ef |grep fcgi
$ kill -9 XXXX XXXX XXXX

Enable “backlogs” in your project’s setting tab.


Your Project > Settings > Modules

Chart Data Generator: The author of the plugin says: “You may schedule a cron job to run the rake task named redmine:backlogs_plugin:generate_chart_data. I recommend you run it a few minutes after midnight to ensure that your backlogs have data everyday even when no user views the charts.”


$ rake redmine:backlogs_plugin:generate_chart_data RAILS_ENV="production"

I’d like to thank to Mark Maglana for this great “Scrum/Agile” plugin.

Following the steps above, I successfully upgraded Redmine and installed “backlogs” plugin. If you encounter any problems please refer to "Redmine’s official documentation:http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki