Loading ...Migrating from Trac to Redmine
I just finished the migration of my trac installation to redmine. The redmine migrate_from_trac documentation helped a lot, but there were some issues that didn’t work quite as described; this post will describe the correct steps I had to follow in order to import my old trac data (tickets, wiki pages, etc) in redmine.
1. Use Redmine 0.8.x stable
I lost some time with the current trunk version (r2571) until I realized that the importer is broken in trunk. Use the latest stable 0.8.x version, and if you want to use trunk, upgrade to it after you have the trac data inside redmine. While using trunk all was working fine (no error or anything strange), just the wiki pages were not imported in the redmine project. Anyway, I will assume you have a working clean installation of redmine 0.8.x before we will move on.
2. Import Trac data
My trac (0.11.2) database was using sqlite3; meaning I had to install first sqlite3-ruby:
gem install sqlite3-ruby
Next I ran the import script from inside the root redmine folder:
rake redmine:migrate_from_trac RAILS_ENV="production"
and entered the following:
Trac directory []: /var/trac/project
Trac database adapter (sqlite, sqlite3, mysql, postgresql) [sqlite]: sqlite3
Database encoding [UTF-8]:
Target project identifier []: projectif for your trac installation uses sqlite then use the original doc steps. For the target project identifier use a name for a new project in redmine that will have the trac data imported (small caps).
The script showed a summary of the imported objects, and hopefully you will find them inside the redmine new project. In my case most of the wiki pages were ok, but some had wrong formatting and needed to be manually fixed (minor issues). Overall I am very happy on how this worked and that I have now all my old trac data inside redmine.
3. Upgrade to trunk (only if you want to use trunk)
If you wanted to use trunk (like me) you can now migrate the redmine installation to trunk using svn (make backups first, etc):
svn sw http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk .
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="production"
rake config/initializers/session_store.rb
and restart redmine, and you should be running trunk.
12th March 2009, 16:32
Sorry if I missed this…but just out curiosity, why did you move to Redmine? And are you happy with it so far?
12th March 2009, 17:16
Please, point the main reasons get you moved to Redmime. Which features Redmime has that Trac has not?
Thanks in advance.
12th March 2009, 17:53
@Saint Aardvark, @Murilo: there is no real reason for doing this. I wanted to test redmine for a while, as I heard only good things about it. I am just playing and testing it, but needed to be able to import my existing trac stuff. If this was not possible I would have not done this for sure
.
I am not trying to say one is better than the other but if you asked here is my opinion on each one main adv:
Trac: big community; many plugins and hacks available; used on many places so people are familiar with its interface.
Redmine: newer project, frequent changes and updates. Obviously its main advantage is multi-project support out of the box (i know this can be done in trac also, but that is not so nice). also it is very customizable in any way you might need it.
So far I am happy with it; I am using the Basecamp theme and it looks very nice; I use 3 other projects besides the trac import, each with its own backend repo (2 svn, one git).
- Marius -
12th March 2009, 18:47
We start to playing with redmine about three months ago and used to it very quickly. Redmine can do same things as trac but main reasons why we are now migrating all our tracs to redmine is:
– very nice multi project support
– our language is Ruby and redmine code is nice and easily customizable
– our mother language isn’t english, redmine has translations
– redmine has many futures in base install, no need to many plugins
– redmine seems more comfortable for our customers. From my point of view, trac is more focused on developers and geeks, not to persons with little computer knowledge
Choosing between Trac and Redmine is based mainly on your current needs.
20th April 2009, 03:24
Just started playing with redmine, we had 30 something trac reports setup cos i couldn’t find an easy way to make a Multiple project situation.
So far.. brillant.. main reason for shifting.. speed. Even on a fast box.. trac was still a slug