New RubyStack version in Bitnami Library

We are happy to announce that we have updated our Bitnami RubyStacks (2.0.0-20 and 2.1.2-3) to the latest versions of Passenger, Node.js, PHP and Nginx, among others.

If you are not familiar with it, Bitnami RubyStack provides a fully-configured and ready to run Ruby on Rails development environment. You can download or deploy it to the cloud free of charge with our ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs), Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) or Azure Images

In addition to the base Ruby runtime and libraries, the stack includes the most popular gems for building Rails applications: Passenger, Nokogiri, Rake, RMagick, Mongrel, Thin and more. It also includes the latest stable release of Ruby, RVM, Rails, Apache, NGinx, MySQL, SQLite, Git, Varnish, Sphinx, PHP and phpMyAdmin.

All updates to this development stack are listed in it's changelog, but below are the main components:

• Updated Passenger to 4.0.50
• Updated Node.js to 0.10.31
• Updated PHP to 5.4.32
• Updated Nginx to 1.6.1

If you have any question about Bitnami RubyStack you can check our quick start guide or you can create a new thread in our community forums .

Updated Redmine stack and upgrade instructions

We are happy to announce new BitNami Redmine stacks for the 2.1.3 and 1.4.5 versions of the popular project management tool. Both versions are running now the latest stable version of Ruby, 1.9.3-p327 and the latest passenger 4 beta which significantly improve the performance of the application. Check our previous post for more details of the enhancements we have been implementing for all Ruby-based apps in the BitNami library.

If you are an existing Redmine user, the rest of the article explains step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade to the latest version using the BitNami stack. 

First, check the plugins that you are currently using and make sure that they support the latest 2.1.x version. If your plugins are not compatible with the 2.x releases, you may want to upgrade to the latest BitNami Redmine 1.4.5 version instead.

Next, create a backup of your previous installation. It is necessary to create a database backup and make a copy of your uploaded files. The steps below are valid to upgrade from a previous BitNami Redmine installation, in a non-BitNami installation the process should be similar.

$ /installdir/mysql/bin/mysqldump -u root -p bitnami_redmine > redmine_backup.sql

$ tar -czvf redmine-files.tar.gz /installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/files

The next step is to install the new BitNami Redmine version. You can download a native installer, the virtual machine or start a new instance in the Amazon cloud. You can use the same machine or you can consider migrating your servers to the cloud (heck out some reasons why you may want to move your infrastructure to the cloud)

Once you have the new Redmine version running, install the plugins that you need. Then copy the database backup and the files directory backup to the machine and restore them. Check that you are running these command from the BitNami Redmine console, so the appropriate environment variables are preloaded.

$ /installdir/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p bitnami_redmine < redmine_backup.sql

$ tar -xzvf redmine-files.tar.gz /installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/

Next, migrate the database to the new version.

$ cd /installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs

$ rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

If you have installed plugins, you should run the following command:

$ rake redmine:plugins:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Alternativelt, if you are using the 1.4.x version, the migration command is the following:

$ rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV=production

If you find any issue during the migration, check our Wiki or post in our forum. Now you can start Redmine again and access it via the web. You will probably want to configure the email settings in the new Redmine installation in the "/installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/config/configuration.yml" file. You can find here an example using a GMail account.

Finally, some users also want to change the URL to access the app from the root of the domain name (http://example.com instead of http://example.com/redmine). The below provides sample configuration changes.

DocumentRoot /installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/public

#Alias /redmine /installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/public

<Directory "/installdir/apps/redmine/htdocs/public">

  Options -MultiViews

  allow from all

</Directory>

#<Location /redmine>

#  SetEnv RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT "/redmine"

#  RackBaseURI /redmine

#</Location>

PassengerPreStart http://example.com/

That's all! Enjoy your new, faster than ever Redmine, powered by BitNami.

Updated BitNami Redmine stacks (Ruby 1.9, Passenger 4)

We are happy to announce that BitNami Redmine, BitNami RubyStack and other Ruby-based stacks have been updated to include Ruby 1.9 and Passenger 4 beta with one goal in mind: improving performance. There are benchmarks that prove Ruby 1.9 is almost 2x faster than 1.8 version, and it feels even faster in the real world. 

The following are several BitNami applications that have been re-released with Ruby 1.9 support:

- Redmine, project management tool.

- Spree, an e-commerce platform.

- Tracks, a web-based application to help you implement the GTD methodology.

- Radiant, a Ruby On Rails CMS. We have upgraded it to 1.1.0 version.

- In addition to that, all of the BitNami PHP-based modules like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, SugarCRM and others will run well on top of RubyStack.

         

The default configuration for production environments for Linux and OS X is now Apache running with the Passenger module. However, if you prefer to use Nginx with Passenger, BitNami RubyStack ships the Nginx server and the Passenger extension already compiled and ready-to-use! Please see below for how easy it is to enable Nginx server with Passenger.

$ cd /opt/bitnami (or your installation directory)

$ ./ctlscript.sh stop apache

Edit the "nginx/conf/nginx.conf" and add the public path to your application. For example, Redmine application:

 server {

    listen 80; (or a different port)

    root /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/htdocs/public;

    passenger_enabled on;

    rails_env production;

    passenger_base_uri /redmine;

 }

Disable Apache server and enable Nginx.

$ mv apache2/scripts/ctl.sh apache2/scripts/ctl.sh.disable

$ mv nginx/scripts/ctl.sh.disable nginx/scripts/ctl.sh

$ ./ctlscript.sh start nginx

On Windows, all BitNami Ruby-based stacks ship DevKit, a development tool kit for adding gems that require C/C++ extensions easily. Now it is even easier to customize your applications or extend their functionality adding plugins.

BitNami Redmine 2.0 Released!

We are happy to announce that we have released a new version of the BitNami Redmine Stack that includes the just-released Redmine 2.0.0. This new version of Redmine adds support for the latest Rails 3 release.

In addition to this, we have improved the deployment configuration so it can benefit from the latest improvements in Rails 3.

On Linux and OS X, the default configuration now uses Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails) instead of Mongrel Cluster servers. This configuration improves the Redmine application performance for these platforms (according to these tests).

Unfortunately, Passenger is not available for Windows, so the BitNami Redmine Stack uses Thin servers instead of Mongrel to deploy the Redmine application. Different benchmark tests show that Thin performance is also better than Mongrel.

Download the free native installer or virtual machine or deploy the new Redmine 2.0.0 version to the Amazon cloud in one click from the BitNami Redmine page. Enjoy!