Distro Redmine Ubuntu 20.04LTS not installing any plugins?

Question

I am wondering, if this is something wrong with my installation, or should I report this to Ubuntu Redmine packagers.

I have an Ubuntu 20.04LTS system on which I installed redmine from Ubuntu distro:

apt install redmine redmine-pgsql

The installed version is redmine 4.0.6-2

The package works fine on its own, I can run redmine with mod_passenger.

However, whenever I try to install any plugin (from redmineUP, or other sources, checking for support for redmine 4.0), I:

1. get NO dependencies installed when executing bundle install --without development test --no-deployment -- just a message saying everything is fine.

2. get various missing dependancies related errors when execing bundle exec rake redmine:plugins NAME={plugin} RAILS_ENV=production

The only plugins work that are also packaged by distro: apt-get install redmine-plugin-custom-css works, but that is only a single plugin... about 2 are available, but no agile/kanban/etc.

As I started to dig in deeper, I noticed also that redmine is supposed to run under ruby2.6

However, Ubuntu releases don't have it: Ubuntu 18 used ruby2.3 and Ubuntu 20 uses ruby2.7 !

Has anyone been succcesful in using plugins with Ubuntu distro install of Redmine, or is this something I should report at Ubuntu distro?

Answer 1

It turns out that for distro packaged Redmine you can't use the default Redmine plugin installation procedure which is described in Redmine page.

Instead you have to follow distro plugin installation procedure, which in Ubuntu case is noted in /usr/share/doc/redmine/README.Debian.gz and which is:

You can manually install plugins by dropping them in the /usr/share/redmine/plugins/ directory (all files must be readable by the www-data user), and running the redmine setup again:

dpkg-reconfigure --default-priority redmine

However, README says you should actually use --unseen-only switch. Which you MUST NOT DO, else it will silently delete all your existing configurations (eg. LDAP authentication sources), users and passwords and will reset Redmine to initial config with single admin user.

Instead, during running dpkg-reconfigure you must choose No when asked to reset database. This will then configure plugin and leave your existing config alone.