How to install Redmin Plugin

July 6, 2021 . 3 MIN READ

Plugin list

A full list of available Redmine plugins can be found at the Plugin Directory.

More plugins (some in very early development), which are not listed at the Plugin Directory but are publicly available on GitHub, can be found using a search like this.

Installing a plugin

Copy your plugin directory into #{RAILS_ROOT}/plugins (Redmine 2.x) or #{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins (Redmine 1.x). If you are downloading the plugin directly from GitHub, you can do so by changing into your plugin directory and issuing a command like git clone git://github.com/user_name/name_of_the_plugin.git.
If the plugin requires a migration, run the following command to upgrade your database (make a db backup before).

2.1. For Redmine 1.x:

rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV=production

2.2. For Redmine 2.x:

rake redmine:plugins:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Restart Redmine

You should now be able to see the plugin list in Administration -> Plugins and configure the newly installed plugin (if the plugin requires to be configured).

Uninstalling a plugin

If the plugin required a migration, run the following command to downgrade your database (make a db backup before):

1.1. For Redmine 1.x:

rake db:migrate:plugin NAME=plugin_name VERSION=0 RAILS_ENV=production

1.2. For Redmine 2.x:

rake redmine:plugins:migrate NAME=plugin_name VERSION=0 RAILS_ENV=production

Remove your plugin from the plugins folder: #{RAILS_ROOT}/plugins (Redmine 2.x) or #{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins (Redmine 1.x)..
Restart Redmine

Writing plugins

There is a step-by-step tutorial about writing a plugin. Some more (detailed) information is collected and stored in the “plugin internals” page.
More (general) developer information can be found in the Redmine Developer Guide.

Migrating Plugins

There are changes in Plugins API or new Rails requirements which need to be considered if you want to use plugin from prior version of redmine.
In any case it’s proposed to update and migrate redmine core system first without plugins and then if stable try to drop in one by one, to know where problems come from if any.

Consideration towards plugins which overwrite views completly because of bad coding style or there is no “hook” available shall be made in any case. Maybe you can collect and write down plugin references here which are of this type.

Let’s start with..

Redmine_blocks

Redmine 1.3 > 1.4

routes.rb which defines url to controller (parameter, action) mapping must be created in <plugin>/config/routes.rb
ARCondition is gone with no replacement
TabularFormBuilder is now Redmine::Views::LabelledFormBuilder
defining your own context menus now requires helper :context_menus in the respective controller
of course, returning is deprecated in favor of tap
if you’re doing anything with repos check it twice, because there can be multiple repos now per project
Project#visible_by is deprecated and replaced by Project#visible_condition

For most of our Redmine Hosting Planio Enterprise clients, we have recently completed the upgrade to Redmine 1.4.4 and have migrated a number of plugins. You can find our forks on Github (look for a redmine-1.4 branch!). If you still find bugs, please let us know and we’ll have a look.