Redmine

I'm writing in the hope it will help others googling later, and perhaps to give suggestions to those writing the official installation instructions here:
http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineInstall (I'm too noobish to update the wiki myself)

I'm running a "portable" version of XAMPP (as in removable drive where the letter changes) on which I want to install Redmine. Therefore, rather than using the automated installer for Ruby, I downloaded the zip file and set the path to ruby\bin from my "set-env" batch file. So far so good.

<X:\>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i386-mingw32]

But:

<X:\>gem -v

1.5.2

It seems this is too new a version of rubygems, as per the install page listed above:

RubyGems 1.3.1 or higher is required (Rails 2.3.5 will fail with RubyGems 1.5.0 and later, stick to previous versions of RubyGems)

After a bunch of googling 8-(

I found this on Stack Overflow:

gem update --system 1.3.7

which works to "downgrade" to a rubygems version suitable for Redmine.

Next issue I ran into is I had to run:

gem install --remote rake
Successfully installed rake-0.8.7

which I'm sure would have been done for me by the automated install.

The install page should specify that:

rake generate_session_store

needs to be run from the redmine folder, and BTW I had to run:

<X:\redmine>gem install -v=0.4.2 i18n
Successfully installed i18n-0.4.2

before the rake command worked, and had to run:

<X:\redmine>gem install -v=1.0.1 rack
Successfully installed rack-1.0.1

and had to copy libmysql.dll into ruby/bin - the one from my latest XAMPP's MySQL\bin didn't work, much larger and newer than the one referenced in the install page, which did.

before this command would work:

rake db:migrate

Note that the latter two steps above are mentioned as "maybes" for the windoze environment toward the bottom of the install page 8-( - but in my case they were definitely needed.

This one ran fine:

rake redmine:load_default_data

and then so did the test using webrick. Yayy!

So in general, kudos to the author/maintainers of that install page, and I would suggest that the install page be updated with the above details as appropriate, as this will allow anyone to run a Redmine instance on any machine from a flash drive, or other external device, when you don't have control over the machine, i.e. "Portable Redmine". I'm just not confident to edit the page myself, since other than the above I haven't ever touched the program.

Hope this post is helpful for other noobs like me.