Redmine

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for Redmine. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing, choose Select, then choose Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of t3.small or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login). Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet, then create or select a security group that opens port 22 from your management network and port 80 for the web interface. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger.

Select Launch instance. After the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass, first-boot initialization takes a minute or two. During that time Redmine builds its per-instance database and rotates the administrator password.

Run the following command to launch an instance from the SecureAnyCloud Redmine Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing and <key-name> with your EC2 key pair name. Replace <subnet-id> with your subnet ID and <security-group-id> with a security group that opens ports 22 and 80, as described above.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type t3.small \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=redmine}]'

When the instance reaches the Running state and its status checks pass, note its public IP address or DNS name. You can find it in the EC2 console or with aws ec2 describe-instances.

Connect over SSH with your key pair and the login user for your operating system variant.

OS variant SSH login user

Ubuntu 24.04 ubuntu

ssh -i <key-name>.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>

Your instance generated a unique Redmine administrator password on first boot. Read it as root:

sudo cat /root/redmine-credentials.txt

The file lists the Redmine URL, the administrator user name (admin), the generated password and the database credentials. Keep the password somewhere safe.

nginx serves the Redmine web interface on port 80. In a browser, go to:

http://<public-ip>/

Choose Sign in and log in as admin with the password from the credentials file.

You land on your personal overview page. From there you can reach your projects, the issues assigned to you and the administration panel.

From the top menu, choose Projects, then New project. Give the project a name and identifier. Choose the modules you need, such as issue tracking, wiki and time tracking, and select the trackers, for example Bug, Feature and Support.

Save the project to open its overview. The configured modules appear there as tabs.

Open a project and choose New issue. Pick a tracker, set the subject and description, assign the issue to a member, and set the priority, target version and due date.

The project Issues tab lists every issue with filters and saved queries. Use them to slice the backlog by status, assignee, tracker or custom field. Switch to the Gantt chart or calendar views to plan the work.

Over SSH, confirm that the application, the database and the nginx proxy are active and that the ports are listening:

sudo systemctl is-active redmine mariadb nginx
sudo ss -tlnp | grep -E ':(80|3306|3000) '

All three services report active. MariaDB listens on 127.0.0.1:3306 (loopback only), Puma on 127.0.0.1:3000, and nginx on port 80.

The administration panel is where you manage the whole instance. From the top menu, choose Administration to reach users and groups, roles and permissions, trackers, issue statuses, workflows, custom fields, enumerations and the global settings.

This is also where you enable the REST API and configure outgoing email.

Redmine exposes a REST API on the same port 80 for programmatic access. First enable it in Administration > Settings > API by ticking Enable REST web service. Then generate a personal API key from My account > API access key.

With the key you can read and create projects and issues. For example, list the projects visible to your key:

curl -s -H 'X-Redmine-API-Key: <REDMINE_ADMIN_PASSWORD>' \
  http://<public-ip>/projects.json

Replace <REDMINE_ADMIN_PASSWORD> with your personal API key, not the login password. The API returns JSON for projects, issues, users, time entries and more, so you can integrate Redmine with your own tooling and automation.

The project database lives on a dedicated EBS volume mounted at /var/lib/mysql. This keeps the database off the operating system disk and lets you resize or snapshot it independently. Confirm the mount:

df -h /var/lib/mysql

To grow the database store, expand the EBS volume in the AWS console. Then grow the filesystem on the instance by running sudo resize2fs on the underlying device.

nginx serves the web interface over plain HTTP on port 80. For production use, place it behind TLS.

Obtain a certificate for your domain, for example a managed certificate on an Application Load Balancer in front of the instance, or Certbot installed on the instance. Then configure nginx to listen on 443 with your certificate and proxy to the Redmine Puma socket, exactly as the bundled site does for port 80.

Restrict the security group so that ports 80 and 443 are reachable only from the networks that use the tracker.

Back up Redmine by snapshotting the /var/lib/mysql EBS volume, which captures the entire project database. Also archive /opt/redmine/files, which holds uploaded attachments. You can take a logical database dump on the instance with mysqldump as well.

Apply operating system security updates with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, and reboot when a new kernel is installed. Redmine, MariaDB and nginx start automatically on boot.