In a previous post I detailed how to install Redmine on Linux using the excellent Bitnami docker image.

This post will teach you how to easily make an online backup of your Redmine installation. Note that automating the backup is not within the scope of this post.

We assume that the redmine is installed as shown in my previous post in /var/lib/redmine. and that you want to backup to my.backup.server:~/redmine-backup/ using rsync.

Backing up the Redmine data

This is pretty easy, as the data is all in just one directory. You can sync it using

rsync --checksum -Pavz /var/lib/redmine/redmine_data my.backup.server:~/redmine-backup/

Note that old versions of files in redmine_data will be overwritten, however files that are deleted locally will not be deleted on the backup server. To me, this seems like a good compromise between the ability to recover deleted files and the used storage space.

Backing up the Redmine database

This part is slightly more complicated, since we need to access the MariaDB server running in a different container. Important note: The container ID can change so it is not sufficient to just find the container ID once and then use it. You need to determine the appropriate ID each time you do a backup. See below on instructions how to do that.

Full command:

docker exec -it $(docker container ls | grep redmine_mariadb_1 | cut -d' ' -f1) mysqldump -uroot bitnami_redmine | xz -e9 -zc - > redmine-database-dump-$(date -I).sql.xz

Let’s break it down:

• docker exec -it (container ID) (command): Run a command on a running docker container.
• docker container ls | grep redmine_mariadb_1 | cut -d' ' -f1: Get the ID (first field of the output cut -d' ' -f1) of the running docker container named redmine_mariadb_1
• mysqldump -uroot bitnami_redmine: This is run on the docker container and dumps the Redmine Database as SQL to stdout. No password is neccessary since the Bitnami MariaDB image allows access without any password.
• xz -e9 -zc -: Takes the data from mysqldump from stdin (-), compresses it using maximum compression settings (-e9 -z) and writes the compressed data to stdout.
• > redmine-database-dump-$(date -I).sql.xz: Writes the compressed data from xz into a file called redmine-database-dump-(current date).sql.xz in the current directory.

The resulting file is called e.g. redmine-database-dump-2019-02-01.sql.xz and it’s placed in the current directory. Ensure that you run the command in a suitable directory. Run it in /tmp if you don’t know which directory might be suitable.

Now we can rsync it to the server:

rsync --checksum -Pavz redmine-backup-*.sql.xz my.backup.server:~/redmine-backup/

Since the filename contains the current data, this approach will not overwrite old daily backups of the database, so you can restore your database very flexibly.

In a previous post I detailed how to install Redmine on Linux using the excellent Bitnami docker image.

This post shows you how to install a custom theme like A1 (which I used successfully for more than 5 years) if you use the bitnami Docker image. We will assume that you installed redmine in /var/lib/redmine and your systemd service is called redmine.

Note: If you get any permission denied errors, try running the same command using sudo.

First, we need to create the themes directory.

sudo mkdir /var/lib/redmine/themes

The first thing we need to do is to copy the current (default) themes to that directory, since Redmine won’t be able to start up if the default theme isn’t available in the correct version.

In order to do this, we must first ensure that your container is running:

sudo systemctl start redmine

Now we can find out the container ID of the running redmine container:

uli:/var/lib/redmine$ docker container ps | grep redmine
ae4de10d0b41        bitnami/redmine:latest    "/app-entrypoint.sh …"   30 minutes ago      Up 30 minutes   0.0.0.0:3718->3000/tcp   redmine_redmine_1
c231d11c48e9        bitnami/mariadb:latest    "/entrypoint.sh /run…"   30 minutes ago      Up 30 minutes   3306/tcp redmine_mariadb_1

From these lines, you need to select the line that says redmine_redmine_1 at the end. The one that lists redmine_mariadb_1 at the end is the database container and we don’t need that one for this task.

From that line, copy the first column – this is the container ID – e.g. ae4de10d0b41 in this example.

Now we can copy the default theme folder:

docker cp ae4de10d0b41:/opt/bitnami/redmine/public/themes /var/lib/redmine/themes

Now copy your custom theme (e.g. the a1 folder) to /var/lib/redmine/themes.

The next step is to fix the permissions. The bitnami container uses the user with UID 1001, so we need to change the owner to that. Repeat this every time you changed something in the themes directory:

sudo chown -R 1001:1001 /var/lib/redmine/themes

At this point we need to edit the docker-compose config (in /var/lib/redmine/docker-compose.yml) to mount /var/lib/redmine/themes in the correct directory. This is pretty easy: Just add - '/var/lib/redmine-szalata/themes:/opt/bitnami/redmine/public/themes' to the volumes section of the redmine container.

The finished config file will look like this:

version: '2'
services:
  mariadb:
    image: 'bitnami/mariadb:latest'
    environment:
      - ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD=yes
    volumes:
      - '/var/lib/redmine/mariadb_data:/bitnami'
  redmine:
    image: 'bitnami/redmine:latest'
    environment:
      - REDMINE_USERNAME=admin
      - REDMINE_PASSWORD=redmineadmin
      - REDMINE_EMAIL=me@gmail.com
      - SMTP_HOST=smtp.gmail.com
      - SMTP_PORT=25
      - SMTP_USER=me@gmail.com
      - SMTP_PASSWORD=yourGmailPassword
    ports:
      - '3718:3000'
    volumes:
      - '/var/lib/redmine/redmine_data:/bitnami'
      - '/var/lib/redmine/themes:/opt/bitnami/redmine/public/themes'
    depends_on:
      - mariadb

Now you can restart Redmine:

sudo systemctl restart redmine

and set your new theme by selecting it in Administration -> Settings -> Display.