We’re in the middle of working out some project and process management issues for BlueSwarm, one of which is what platform to use for project management and issue tracking. We used Basecamp for awhile, which was great, but we needed something that was a bit more geared towards tracking bugs. Free would be a nice bonus. Trac seems to be the industry standard here, and a few days ago, I spent several hours trying to get Trac installed and running correctly. Getting it up and running wasn’t terribly difficult, but I was struggling to get several plugins hooked up and configured, get it working with Apache, etc. After awhile, I finally got tired of messing with it and went hunting for alternatives. One of the ones that I found was Redmine, which is built in Ruby on Rails. I played with the demo and really liked it, so I set out to get Rails installed on our server so we could get Redmine setup. Rails turned out to be less of a hassle than I had imagined it would be, which was nice. The one issue I had was that Redmine is not compatible with Rails 2.2.2, so I had to downgrade to an older version. But I got it working, got Passenger working so we could use Apache as our server, and now we’re up and running. Redmine is clean, simple to use, and works great so far. I have no complaints. If you’re looking for a solid issue tracking / wiki / project management platform and you’re frustrated with Trac, give Redmine a try. I’d love to hear what you think.
I teach freelancers to be unstoppable.
Published November 28, 2008 — Last updated May 30, 2016 — 2 minute read