So after looking through the services, it seems that everyone recommends heroku as a good PaaS. It’s also free for the super basic service. (:

Of course, the first thing I did was try to install redmine. I really wanted a permanent issue tracking for my projects. I could leave it on my computer and do rails server every time I want to add/update an issue. But that seems pretty boring (I might as well just use posted notes).

Setting up redmine locally was very easy. All it took was edit database.yml and do bundle install --without rmagick. Create a database in mysql and done.

I cannot say it was easy to set up on Heroku. There are lots of confusing steps. Especially the whole thing with Gemfile and Gemfile.lock. There was a point where I couldn’t to push to heroku because my Gemfile.lock had gems that didn’t match Gemfile. Honestly, I’m still new to Ruby, so I have no idea what’s going on.

However thanks to this guide I got through it.

Every step in the guide is as important as another.

Here’s a copy of the guide just in case it ever disappears.

  1. `git clone https:..github.com/redmine/redmin.git` or wherever the latest redmine version is hosted
  2. `git checkout 2.5-stable` or whatever the latest stable version is
  3. `cd redmine`
  4. remove the follow from `.gitignore` 
    Gemfile.lock
Gemfile.local
public/plugin_assets
config/initializers/session_store.rb
config/initializers/secret_token.rb
config/configuration.yml
config/email.yml
  5. Heroku seems to love postgresql. Not sure why... Do not edit database.yml, so ignore *"Please configure your config/database.yml first"*. Heroku actually builds database.yml with the proper cloud information
  6. `bundle install`
  7. `rake generate_secret_token`
  8. `heroku create`
  9. remove `exit 1` at line 10 from `config/environment.rb`
  10. remove add `config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false` between line 13 and line 14 to `config/application.rb`
    Should look like this 
    ...
12: module RedmineApp
13:   class Application < Rails::Application
14:     config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false
15:     # Settings in config/environments/* take precedence over those specified here.
...
  11. Commit the changes 
        
git add -A
git commit -m “preparing for heroku”
git push heroku 2.5-stable:master
  12. Run a few things on heroku side 
    heroku run rake db:migrate
heroku run rake redmine:load_default_data

If you are going to use unicorn or something other than webrick (you probably shouldn’t use webrick for production server) be sure you follow the proper procedures e.g. unicorn

Remember to always run bundle install before pushing.

*** Do not attempt to try to get github repo to integrate properly. It follow the steps from github_hook, I did get the webhook request to work, but redmine would not display the repo. I think it might have something to do with permissions in Heroku’s server. I just gave up on that, and focus on managing the projects.