Redmine is a great project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. I've been using it to help myself organize all of the many coding (and recently music) projects I work on.

For some reason, when I initially installed it on my Site 5 host, I grabbed some non-stable release (1.0.2.devel.4232) to begin my experience with Redmine. Everything works fine, so it doesn't really matter, but I've always thought I should install a more stable version. It would have bug fixes and new features, so why not?

A few weeks ago I grabbed the 1.0.5 release and tried upgrading, only to be met by an issue with the i18n Ruby gem. No matter how many times I installed it, running one of the upgrade steps helpfully reminded me I did not have it. I tried some general troubleshooting (reinstalling gem, checking Google, etc.), but couldn't get it working. I gave up and went back to my dev release, which still happily worked.

Recently, Redmine's development blog announced their 1.1.0 release, so I downloaded it, uploaded it to my server, and went through all of the upgrade steps again. Once I got to the end, I tried running the command that plagued me before, reaching the same result. Some more research led me to do some .bash_profile updates and some app/config/environment additions. Finally, the gem was recognized and I was on my way. Bringing up my browser and typing in my brand-spankin' new subdomain into Google Chrome was surely going to get me back to work with actually using Redmine instead of just installing it. Right? Not yet.

My app instead spat out a message explaining that there was a missing file. I found a fix. Now my app just says it can't start at all. Checking the Redmine app logs show nothing. Checking the main server Apache error logs was not helpful.

Grrrrrr.

UPDATE

As usual, a friend more wise in these ways helped me out. I had been neglecting to turn on Passenger support in an .htaccess file, so the server was using another technology to try and load Redmine. Once I added the right lines, it sprang to life.

I just checked everything and all my data appears to be intact. Back to managing projects!