Setting Up Redmine for Solo Developers

Developers often have many projects going on at the same time. If you're a developer, keeping everything organized can be tough. It's hard enough when you are part of a software development team (who hopefully has a dedicated project management system already). Project management can become exceptionally tricky for solo developers.

Solo developers have to do everything in a project. In my personal experience, having that massive amount of responsibility is often overwhelming. I used to keep TODOs in a text file (and used a whiteboard for daily tasks), but my TODO file became so large that I had to split it. Splitting the file just made me more confused about what I needed to do.

How did I solve this? I started using Redmine.

Redmine for Solo Developers

Redmine is a web-based project management system. It uses Ruby on Rails, and I have experience with deploying Ruby apps, so Redmine is a natural choice for me. The official Redmine installation guide covers much of what you need to know to setup Redmine. Here's a quick guide to how I installed Redmine on a local server (a Mac Mini that I have previously talked about):

1. Create a new user and install rbenv (you could also use RVM) to that user's home directory
2. Follow the official Redmine installation guide.
1. Make sure that you install SQLite; managing a file is easier than managing a SQL server
2. During the "Database connection configuration" step, specify a SQLite database file for the production server
3. You may run into some trouble running migrations: these errors are easily corrected & solutions are out there (usually, searching for the error message works)
3. Make sure that the server runs using WEBrick
4. Setup & run Thin (or any other Ruby server)
1. This is partially discussed in the official install guide under "Additional dependencies"

This setup will give you a project management system that will work well, provided that you are the only one using it. You should look into using different technology (especially for the SQL server) if you are setting-up Redmine for a team.