Prelude
Many developers have been in a position where one way or another they were using a project management tool such as Microsoft TFS, JIRA or others. Some of them are better than others and many of them are paid or require certain components. Many of them are very hardly customizable and many more are not a good fit for a personal project or when the costs should stay low. The best option of all of the low cost alternatives is one which is free. And wide spread. And which has a big community.Redmine
Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using the Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).Redmine is easy to use, easy to extend and easy to customize software. With a basic skills of CSS it takes very little time to give it a new appearance if you can not find anything suitable out of the plenty themes available for free on the Internet.
Dump
Every developer can recall at least some cases when he has done something and then a catastrophe has happened - he wrongfully ruined his work himself, the software glitch corrupted the data in the database, hardware glitch bricked the hard drive and the information was gone. All of those are examples of a disaster which can hardly be foreseen, but which always can be prevented. Dumping the information regularly will significantly lower if not absolutely remove all consequences of data corruption. Dumps can be local and remote. While local dumps will help you in a situation when the data is corrupted, the remote dumps are essential if the system goes down completely. The best way to dump data is an automated way.S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), provides developers and IT teams with secure, durable, highly-scalable object storage. Amazon S3 is easy to use, with a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. With Amazon S3, you pay only for the storage you actually use. There is no minimum fee and no setup cost.S3 is the best option as of the end of 2014 to have you data preserved remotely at low or now cost at all.
Redmine-Dump
The idea is to dump data every day locally and send a weekly backup to S3. The best option is to create a new user specifically for backup reasons with a very restricted permissions.S3 IAM User policy
From AWS IAM console create an individual IAM user and attach the following policy. You may want to change bucket_name and Version
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement": [
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "s3:PutObject",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::bucket_name/dump/*"
}
]
}
The Resource should be the place on S3 where you want the backups to go. That same resource path should appear in s3-dump.sh S3_DUMP_DIR variable
credentials.dump.sh
credentials.dump.sh is where you define your AWS credentials for the user you've created a few steps above.
$ cat ${HOME}/.config/aws/credentials.dump.sh
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="A...Q"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="E...S"
Other things to override
- common.sh REDMINE_DUMP_DIR - where you want to have your backups at
- dump.sh REDMINE_HOME - where your Redmine is located
- s3-dump.sh AWS_REGION - the AWS region you specified when you created an S3 bucket
- s3-dump.sh S3_DUMP_DIR - where the backups should go to in S3
crontab
Cron is a daemon to have a job to start at a certain day and time.The corresponding crontab can look like this
$ crontab -l # 10:00 AM UTC every day - Dump Redmine 0 10 * * * /home/ec2-user/etc/bin/redmine/redmine-dump/dump.sh >> /home/ec2-user/dump/redmine/redmine-dump.log 2>&1 # 11:30 AM UTC every Sunday - Dump Redmine to S3 30 11 * * 0 /home/ec2-user/etc/bin/redmine/redmine-dump/s3-dump.sh >> /home/ec2-user/dump/redmine/redmine-dump.log 2>&1
