Redmine – open-source project management | Hacker News Reader

Redmine – open-source project management

redmine.org

162 pointssynergy2081 comments

Former Redmine user here; well, I get around so I see a lot of different systems.

Back, c2005 I think, I was CTO-ing for a company that was going through some management changes. The outgoing CTO was a "build it all in-house" type (which I get!) -- however, this dude was extreme -- so in addition to building their own App to make money, they had their own Framework and ORM and X and Y an Z -- which included a bug-tracker. Naturally, it was SHIT and nobody had time to work on it -- cause well the App needed to work and Framework (and ORM and X...) all needed actual things.

One of my first steps was to drop that dead weight. One of the juniors had recently heard of Trac so we dropped that in place and migrated all the tickets (give this junior some stake). A few years later the team was not excited about Trac anymore and that same junior (now medior) was pushing for Redmine -- I was not excited to switch (I love stability).

So I made them do the migration testing, cloning, writing the guides for migration, writing the quick-starts for the team -- sort of "run the whole project". It was not trivial, there was a lot of pre-Trac legacy BS that had just been jammed in from that migration; so we wanted to clean some of that as well. Great learning experience for the team member -- managing and coding/digging in arcane/foreign systems, integrations, etc.

Blah blah right...

Well, that company now has that same junior, now senior in the Big Chair; and they still use Redmine. It's been there for like 15 years! I'm not a daily redmine user (anymore) but Redmine has a nice place for me -- less as a bug tracker and more as a give-a-junior-some-growth-opportunity.

I wish I had these opportunities in my early career. Now 10 years in with no mentorship, direction or real responsibilities, I’m struggling to find self-worth and opportunities to go up the chain. Now that I’m laid off I’m trying to take all of these learnings into consideration, and hope that I too get to climb the ladder some day.

We’ve been looking at Open Project, which is a fork of Redmine:

https://www.openproject.org/blog/openproject-an-alternative-...

I think at this point the differences are rather significant, but we were interested to see what Open Project’s ancestry was.

We've been using Redmine since about 2010 or so. We use it daily for ticket tracking, light PM tasks, and documentation. We've considered moving away from it for years, but our customers love it. These are customers that are extremely large financial institutions and the only thing I can figure is that they are forced to use larger, more complex systems internally (or with other vendors) so they see Redmine as something simple to work with when interfacing with us.

I think it's a great app with a huge amount of flexibility from UI to plugins. It's easy to use, performance is quite good on even lower end hardware, and there is decent documentation if even sometimes dated. We have customers and our internal teams using this app every single day, day in and day out, and it just stays rock solid stable for years on end.

That said, upgrading this thing is an absolute nightmare. And if you need to upgrade the underlying OS you're going to have a bad night or 5. The database design is very abstract so writing ad-hoc queries or trying to fix something manually via the db is not fun at all. I'd seriously rather stub my toe in the middle of the night on an amish made coffee table, twice, than touch this thing on the back end for any purpose.

It probably fails to scale well, but I have found it to be much easier to manage using Docker.

Redmine is great. Serves us without issues since 2007. I honestly don't understand companies using products like Jira when Redmine is available.

The company I work for switched from redmine to jira few years ago, after using redmine since 2009 or so. It was a really bad decision spearheaded by a single project manager.

I miss redmine. I hate having to see the constant interstitial loading animation in Jira. And working through small modals. Just load the damn page for the link I clicked on. All the “single page application” junk is rarely executed well. But I can’t say that it or I’m a dinosaur. Sorry the rant.

You’re not a dinosaur for hating the continued consumerization of products and services targeted toward use cases that are expert in nature.

Sure, have a simpler GUI for Jira Service Desk users in a non-technical customer service role. Give me a different GUI that’s not driven by designers looking to reinvent. I don’t need that, I don’t want that, and it just wastes my time.

It sounds like you might have a permissions issue. You can route issues created from Jira Service Desk to any board you want.

I am speaking philosophically, not with respect to a particular issue.

Something like that also happened at one company I worked for. While Redmine served the company for more than 10 years, and it was still doing great, the new management decided switching to Jira was a must. Maybe it can help other workflows, but for us, it didn't really improve anything, it only made people angrier. That was one of the reasons why I switched jobs.

You forgot to mention the abysmal error handling when these api calls fail.

Jira is so much better now than it was the last time I had to use it, about 10 years ago. It's like a different product with the same name. Maybe it is, I don't know what happened in those 10 years.

I used Redmine for many small projects, probably since 2007. It works well. It's quite simple, not many bells and whistles, which is OK. Maybe not many features but enough to get the work done.

Does it still require filling an update form to change any aspect of a ticket? Maybe we've used an outdated version or it was poorly configured, but I remember switching to modern Jira at other company to be a huge UX improvement, with interactive and responsive everything.

> Does it still require filling an update form to change any aspect of a ticket

Yes, I guess it still does, and for me it's a great thing, as you can do multiple changes at once and the recipient will just receive a single email notification.

By the way, considering Jira's slowness and sluggishness, I think it even takes less time to submit the entire form in Redmine.

No you can right click and edit multiple tickets at once

I'm currently using GitHub Projects for the Kannan view that integrates with Issues.

Does Redmine have that feature?

https://www.redmineup.com/pages/plugins/agile

https://redmine-kanban.com/

There's a lot of paid plugins that throw a new interface on it but no, base redmine doesn't have a click and drag kanban. It does have all kinds of project management integrated with git tickets, I thought the gantt chart was perfectly good tho.

Of course. It has ton of plugins of all kinds one can imagine.

I had to work with a brandlabeled Redmine solution (plan.io) which was a terrible experience. Roughly ten years ago.

I remember it breaking every two weeks in different ways and support always told us it's the underlying original Redmine stuff. Never figured out if this was even true or not, but I avoided it since then just to be sure. Maybe other comments will have some success stories and change my mind.

We've used Redmine around ten years now (I'm the person who brought it in and set it up) and it's been rock solid. I upgrade it every year or so and other than that, don't touch it.

We run everything in the standard configuration and as a general rule do not install any plugins because they can cause a lot of problems, especially during upgrade time.

Ten years ago also redmine was rock solid, a bit slow and not up to today usability standards, but solid.

This is simply not true. Redmine is one of the highest quality open source tools. If that was the case, it was most definitelly related to plugins. Using a lot of plugins is pain as they don't follow the Redmine pace and soon you are locked on latest version that works for you. With more of them you must count on interactions too. I was using 20+ plugins on Redmine and it was pain to maintain. Now I use 3 that are maintained in last decade constantly and life is goood.

What plugins are you using?

I used to have a plug-in that did burn down charts but it depended on flash and doesn’t work anymore

1. DMSF, Redmine LDAP Sync, Redmine Silencer 3

2. Redmine Messenger, Redmine Helpdesk, Redmine People

Group 1 are mandatory for me. Group 2 are nice to have but I can live without those.

Nice, I didn't know Redmine has a Gantt view of some kind. https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineGantt

I usually prefer to use a mix of Gantt and Kanban-ish board simultaneously, and it's important that those all are in sync with the task/issue system and Git activity.

Ahh good old Redmine. I still use it internally. After GitHub allowed private repositories on the free tier I have had less need to use it. But now that people are starting to see the advantages of actual decentralized web a few of these projects are getting a second life.

I still hold my breath when updating my Redmine server. There was typically an unmet dependency that crashed the whole thing. You get really good at reading the error logs.

The interface is archaic, but their api is very powerful.

On my company we use redmine to keep track of time spent on each protect, or even as a simplified Jira substitute. We have the tasks, we just need to "spend time" on them. The interface is slow and requires many clicks, but thanks to their api I made an app to do it with just a couple, even automatic if you only have one task!

It's the number of clicks that got me to move away from redmine. I used redmine for many years and then pivotal tracker. Pivotal lets you expand an issue inline and edit it without loading a new page. If redmine had an interface like that, I would probably still be using it today.

When I was using Redmine I found a great plugin for Sublime Text 3 that could navigate, update and add tickets much more easily than the UI: https://github.com/tosher/Redlime. It smoothed over a lot of the tedium for me. If I still had to use Redmine I would use that plugin even though I've stopped using Sublime.

I wrote PowerShell wrapper and automate most of the tasks with it (we even have some bots using it, that can be controlled via issue notes).

https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-redmine

I work at a small-to-medium sized ISP, and we use pure Redmine since 2018 for documentation, and 'internal tickets'. It's a really good tool, helped us get really organized. You can customize the heck out of it, nowadays we have really complex BIs to monitor tickt times, SLAs, project activity, etc. The API is very good and i made a ton of usefull things with it, even Telegram bots for our internal groups.

The biggest complaint we have on it is how bad it's wiki search features are, and indeed they are too simple.

If you want to play with fancy UI with some modern project management platforms or just paying for Jira, that's totally fine.

If you just want things to work for years ahead and focus on what you do, redmine will be my pick, it has everything I need, nothing fancy, nothing more, get the job done, from issue tracking, to git, to wiki, to file management, to use/clients/customer access, you have them all, solid.

Yes I think of it as the craigslist of project management. The permissions and visibility of different subprojects are easy to configure. Doesn't even require javascript, it's beautiful.

Huge fan of Redmine. Got introduced to it at a job in 2011, then switched jobs in 2015 and brought Redmine to that team. It’s an all around great and flexible tool without any of Jira’s nonsense.

I found it to be more of a burden than a cure, back in the day. Now it's irrelevant

I wish I was still on Redmine. The interface turned off the "boss", but I've been a refugee in attempting to solve his UI issues through Wrike, Trello, ClickUp and more.

I was never more productive as an IT Manager than with Redmine. It's so fast to get things entered and added, which was a boon for us. I miss it.

Oh, RedMine. That’s the project management system I used back in 2006 to run my first StartUp. Along a well working integration with SVN (if ppl remember what SVN is).

I left a job they were still using SVN in 2021. Still worked just fine.

I loved Redmine. Best issue tracker and planner I've ever used. Even the git integration was servicable!

But these days everything (work related) is on Github and while it is pretty mediocre for issue tracking, it is better then having to maintaining a seprate service.

The last shop I worked at used Redmine. The owner loved it, most folks found it okay, but the UX just rubbed me the wrong way. I'm not opposed to working with software with classic UIs and such, that would have been fine if the update workflow and page layout made sense.

I wish I could adequately convey why. Based on other commenters talking about the APIs being strong though, and other products that seem nicer (I tried OpenProject for a time and had a pretty positive experience with it) are built upon it, it really goes to show how much a good UX can make or break a project with really great bones.

Redmine might look clunky from a distance, and its installation is convoluted. However, once it works, it works forever.

It's a "zero unplanned maintenance" tool which works without any problems, and can be extended with tons of features due to its extensible nature.

Maybe it's about being an oldish folk who used "classical UI"s more, yet I still find their information density much better than modern "fluffy and animated" UIs. No JS animations to waste power, no browser version requirement, just a brutalist structure built around function.

Paired with a powerful VM, it loads instantly, works perfectly.

I don't really need a "fluffy and animated" interface. That's not what is important to me when I'm working in a tool. For me, it's more about "How many clicks do I have to do to do a task?", or "can I find the information I'm looking for quickly?" Our task creation workflow often boiled down to "create a bunch of tasks, work them, close them, then repeat". I felt like I was having to do too much work to get information into the app in a way that was disproportionate to it providing the information I needed.

From a maintenance perspective I hear you though. I supported the Redmine install, and I've supported Jira installs in the past. The sheer amount of horsepower I had to throw at, and shenanigans I had to deal with, to support Jira is mind boggling. I have a small joke that the reason Atlassian is going cloud only for their products has everything to do with the fact that only they are big brain enough to understand how to run the damn thing reasonably, haha. And yeah, administering the Redmine install was "oh yeah, we have a Redmine instance, I should probably update that". So that is definitely a feather in its cap.

I also can appreciate that it has a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions to make it your own. I often look at plugins with a grain of salt though, because having more things to add and more dependencies to support drastically changes the administrative burden of a system. For me, I'd rather have one opinionated tool with a minimal but functional feature set. Fortunately, there are alternatives out there that enable that flow for me and my teams, so it's not like I'm not served.

There's always the possibility that Redmine and I just never clicked, and that's okay. I don't _need_ to like every tool, and I can easily see how folks that it did work for got great benefits out of it. My negative experiences are personal to me, but do not discredit the plenty of positive experiences teams have had using it.

Here’s what I remember about Redmine. It was a really great project but it had an iron fisted dictator maintaining it. The big problem was that it severely discouraged outside maintainers. The original creator/maintainer prioritized stability for his own uses over everything else.

I remember there was a fork (chiliproject) that was created that initially had a lot of contributors and enthusiasm that however fizzled it out quite quickly. Turns out, maintaining an issue tracker is a major labor of love that very few can really commit to.

Redmine is fine for ITSM and software development projects because of it's ticket-oriented workflows and source code integration. But as an actual project management tool, ProjeQtor is the best open source tool I've found: https://www.projeqtor.org/en/

It's very lightweight and feature-rich. They really need to get a UI designer who helps them to move from that amateur UI to something that looks professional.

I am shocked to see the design did not change a bit.

Why should it change? It serves its purpose well.

I think he means it's rare to see a project not blindly following new design trends and still doing well.

Is there nothing from UX perspective to improve? Like, absolutely nothing? Is it perfect then?

UX improvements might not be as high in the priority list as other improvements.

Further, as far as I remember, (it’s been a while since I administered a red mine instance) it’s quite possible for an instance owner to actually modify the UI for themselves.

Finally, UX changes come with a significant retraining cost.

With all that considered, it’s quite possible for UX improvements to exist but it also be the right decision to not make those changes.

> design

Maintainers inbox must be exploding with offers to design landing page or do React/Vue app.

For a modern design and current agile practices you may use Taiga.io

Likewise. I used it 10 years ago and it looks the same. Good luck trying to get non-technical people to use it.

Non-tech people can use it with no issues, my whole company uses it. People just need to pay attention to what they are doing, and be organized. At the beginning it can be kinda painfull, but it's all worth it.

I loved Redmine compared to every other system at the time, probably 10-15 years ago, but administering it was annoying. Even using their own install directions wouldn't necessarily work due to all the lame Ruby crap. Eventually it just fell off my radar as an option because of those headaches.

Edit: should mention I feel like this predated ubiquitous docker images for everything.

Redmine is the best. I use it on the projects, as help desk, as HR platform, as company day to day management. Not sure why people look elsewhere. Its open source, extremely performant with hundreeds of projects and thousands of users, extremely customizable. What more can one want.

I introduced Redmine at my last job and it was great. I heard one dev say 'we would never have launched without it'.

My biggest memory of Redmine is that EVERY time I thought, 'I wish it could do x', I clicked around and found it could.

I installed it in 1 click from an Azure template too.

No, Redmine is awful. The only people who like it are developers who have no need of real project management features.

For everyone else it's a labyrinth of bugs, weird UI kludges and something that feels like it's from 1998.

Redmine is what I found when I was searching for a multi-project-trac. I loved trac. https://trac.edgewall.org/browser

wow, what a blast from the past! we used it at my first job over 10 years ago.

Same, I was using it at an old job around that time. I think it was the fact that I we were using it alongside SVN which made me hate it a lot as a side effect. Funny enough, I feel like I'd still take it over jira - the ui is fast which ticks my number one box as a developer.

I’ve been using redmine for a decade for creating a project task breakdown, tracking time on tasks and projects and using that data to invoice customers, as well as issue tracking.

The interface works, I don’t mind it. It allows export of data easily, and pdf generation.

I wish redmine’s website for showing users what plugins exist and are up to date was a bit better. Plug-ins always seem to fall in to disrepair, and can make upgrades difficult.

I am running it through docker on my synology nas.

Wow, through Docker? How please? And Still with APIs?

There are images for it on Docker Hub. I wrote a Redmine deployment spec for the PaaS I use (Caprover) for my personal app server. It’s a lot like Docker Compose, but as it actually functions using the Docker API, some Compose features are unavailable. If you’re familiar with Compose, you should be able to easily adapt this Caprover template: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/aaa12a4f37f7...

Here are the Hub images: https://hub.docker.com/_/redmine

Thank you!

As a user, I loved Redmine. Well designed, has enough features but not too many. As a maintainer I haven't experienced it, but I'd be willing to try it.

I was working with it in a job some years ago, and I remember that it has a great wiki (we used for internal documentation, sprint docs and other things) because I am in a new job and we are working with gitlab (comunity edition) and the wiki is worse.

Interesting it’s GPL licensed. I’ve noticed a lot of these enterprise targeted OSS projects are. Wonder sometimes if this blunts the inertia of their adoption since customizing the software triggers a license violation if it’s not shared

Customizing software does not trigger a license violation, distribution does. If it is an internal tool there is no distribution, and there is no license violation.

As a corollary redmine is written in ruby, I don't think it is possible to distribute it without the source code anyway.

What counts as distribution though? Is serving user’s distribution? Or only distributing source code?

This was the first tool I ever used for bug tracking professionally!

I’d be curious to see what people think about it.

I suspect our implementation was terrible, because I remember hating it.

Looking at it now, it seems appealing.

This is one badly built website: Cannot even see what the tool looks like.

Not sure if I'm missing the joke but in case you're serious : the tool is literally the website.

They're dogfooding themselves eg click on issues then on one issue to see the ticket system.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

If they are serious, this is probably the best example of "Can't see the forest for the trees" example I've come across for a long time.

That said, the site doesn't explicitly say "The site you're reading is running in an instance of Redmine".

Long live redmine!

I'm still insisting on using redmine at our Drupal shop after 15 years instead of switching to Jira (fight me!). We also tried using trac back in 2007 but realized we needed multi project. Every few months/years I keep looking for a more modern alternative (open source or extensible SaaS) but never find anything worth trying beyond adding a few "test" issues. (So far: Jira, Clickup, Linear, Monday, Asana)

We even taught several of our devs Ruby on Rails over the years to write various plugins. One of them quit to go try and work at Shopify, no less!

In the spirit of making my comments useful, here are the custom redmine plugins we built and maintain for ourselves:

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_default_members - This plugin allows to create default members on project creation, based on Redmine groups.

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_slack - This plugin allows to send notifications from your Redmine installation to Slack.

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_atjs Redmine plugin that integrates At.js library to enable auto-completion based on issue titles, while editing wiki and issue pages.

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_evolvingweb_extension... - bunch of random UX hacks we can’t live without. Some aren’t documented in the readme, including ability to search archived projects, and adding extra fields to redmine timesheet reports like Custom Fields on users.

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_paste_text/ - integrates puppypaste.com functionality into Textile “wysiwyg” editor, allowing pasting HTML content (eg from emails) that gets automatically convert to textile

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_easy_edit - allowing CMD/Ctrl + double clicking on rendered text (wiki body, issue comments, or issue description) to jump to edit page and scroll to source textile

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_shortcuts - Simple Redmine plugin that provides keyboard shortcuts. (forked

https://github.com/davidegiacometti/redmine_shortcuts, simply to add ? shortcut for showing list of shortcuts, a la gmail)

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_timesheet_filter_auto... - This plugins adds a super-powered autocomplete filter to time report filters so that you can filter by user, project and other available fields by simply autocompleting.

https://github.com/evolvingweb/redmine_mentions_suggestions - Extends https://www.redmine.org/plugins/redmine-mentions. The first user you mention in an issue comment will be suggested to set as assignee for the current ticket. You can uncheck the box to not change the assignee, otherwise, it will be assigned to this user.

https://github.com/dergachev/redmine_git_remote - Automatically clone and fetch remote git repositories

There’s a few others community plugins that we use:

https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com/projects/redmine-m... - This plugin adds a wiki macro to make it easier to list the details of issues on a wiki page.

https://github.com/haru/redmine_wiki_extensions - Wiki Extensions is a plugin which adds several useful wiki macros to Redmine. - https://www.r-labs.org/projects/r-labs/wiki/Wiki_Extensions_...

https://github.com/twinslash/redmine_omniauth_google - This is a plugin for Redmine registration through google

https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/redmine-list-of-roles-me... - Show a list of all the members of a role grouped by project.

https://github.com/akiko-pusu/redmine_issue_templates - Plugin to generate and use issue templates for each project to assist issue creation.

https://github.com/peclik/clipboard_image_paste - Paste (cropped) image from clipboard as an attachment.

https://www.redmineup.com/pages/plugins/checklists - This is a issue checklist plugin for Redmine

http://redmineup.com/pages/plugins/agile - Scrum and Agile project management plugin for redmine (pro version)

https://github.com/alphanodes/additional_tags/ - bunch of hacks from alphanodes, no idea what they do

Honestly, I hate Redmine with all of my strength, we use it at work and it's a really really large deployment, a fuckton of projects, another fuckton of people and I don't really know if the people managing it did a terrible job or if it's just bad. Some years ago we needed two new types of issues with all the baggage that comes with it and it was HELL, we almost had to do a sacrifice to Satan to make it work like we needed. It's so granular that it becomes an inconvenience, I'd say it's the best advantage and disadvantage of it. Also if it weren't for the python-redmine package I wouldn't touch that API not even with a laser.

We used redmine pretty well. We are on jira, and works fine too. I guess with a fuckton of projects, another fuckton of users, and less structure, every tool can be chaotic.

Can you provide more detail on your problem and how you solved it? Did you add another category? Did you add another tracker?

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