redmine_git_remote

Redmine plugin to automatically clone and remote git repositories.

Installation

Install the plugin as usual:

cd REDMINE_ROOT/plugins
git clone https://github.com/dergachev/redmine_git_remote

Then enable the new GitRemote SCM type in http://redmine-root/settings?tab=repositories

The plugin shells out to the following binaries, so make sure they're available:

• git 1.7.5+ - a version recent enough to support get remote add --mirror=fetch origin URL
• ssh-keyscan
• ssh-keygen

Supporting private repos

For security sake, we don't support cloning over HTTPS with username password, but only via SSH.

For example:

• This private repo will fail to clone: https://github.com/dergachev/my-secret-repo
• Instead, use the SSH form: git@github.com:evolvingweb/my-secret-repo.git

If you're going to use the SSH form, you'll need to install the appropriate SSH keys to ~/.ssh/id_rsa (in the home directory of your redmine webserver user, likely www-data).

Some extra tips:

• For GitHub/GitLab, we have found it too troublesome to install repository-specific SSH keys. Instead we ended up creating recommend creating a dedicated account for redmine and installing the keys there.
• On Ubuntu, the www-data user's $HOME is /var/www, and by default it's owned by root. That means you might have to do this before installing Redmine: sudo mkdir /var/www/.ssh; sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/.ssh

Usage

This plugin defines a new repository type, GitRemote, which allows you to associate a remote repository with your Redmine project. First create a new repository of type GitRemote, enter the clone URL. The identifier and path will be auto-generated, but can be overriden.

On submitting the repository creation form, the identifier and url (filesystem path) fields will be auto-generated (if not explicitly provided).

For example, if you enter https://github.com/dergachev/vagrant-vbox-snapshot as the Clone URL, it will prefill the Identifier and filesystem path fields as follows:

• Identifier: vagrant-vbox-snapshot
• Path: REDMINE_PLUGINS_PATH/redmine_git_remote/repos/github.com/dergachev/vagrant-vbox-snapshot

Once the remote URL is validated, the plugin creates an empty clone at the specified path.

This plugin hooks into the core Repository.fetch_changesets to automatically run git fetch --all on all GitRemote managed repositories as Redmine is about to pull in changesets from the local repos.

To avoid slowing down the GUI, we recommend unchecking the "Fetch commits automatically" setting at http://redmine-root/settings?tab=repositories and relying on the following cron job as per Redmine Wiki Instructions:

*/5 * * * * cd /home/redmine/redmine && ./bin/rails runner Repository.fetch_changesets -e production >> log/cron_rake.log 2>&1

To trigger fetch manually, run this:

cd /home/redmine/redmine && ./bin/rails runner "Repository.fetch_changesets" -e production

Notes:

• Tested on Redmine 3.4 and ruby 2.3
• Currently alpha state, use at your own risk. Given possible security risks of shelling out, we recommend using this plugin only if all RedMine project admins are trusted users.
• This plugin doesn't clean-up (delete) cloned repos from the file system when the record is deleted from Redmine.

• Currently Redmine will crash if this plugin is uninstalled, as rails can't seem to handle model classes disappearing while db records reference them. This snippet should make the error go away:

  ./bin/rails runner 'ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("UPDATE repositories SET type=\"Repository::Git\" WHERE type = \"Repository::GitRemote\")' -e production