Redmine Virtual Machine for Mac, tell us what you think

Hi Redmine users!

We are excited to announce a new project we've been working on: Redmine-VM for Mac. This new type of installer makes it really easy to run Redmine for Linux on your Mac with just a few clicks. No VirtualBox needed!

For this first version, we've focused on making it really easy to:

  • Access and edit files by mounting them on the Mac desktop
  • Access phpMyAdmin and other applications over a secure tunnel with a single-click
  • Configure and prepare your Redmine stack on Linux, often closer to production

In addition to the changes "under the hood", there is a new stack manager interface:

Stack manager interface

This provides a central control point to start or stop services, manage port forwarding, work with files and run commands.

Getting started

To get started with the new stack manager, launch it as usual and click the "Start" button to start the hypervisor. This will also start all the Redmine-VM services.

Start redmine services

You can also manage individual services from the OS X tray:

Manage services from Mac OS X

What's new: port forwarding and mounted volumes

The stack manager provides a graphical interface to forward ports between Redmine-VM and the host system. It comes with a pre-defined rule to forward Redmine-VM's port 80 to port 8080 on the host. So, you can now access phpMyAdmin (and other Web applications running on Redmine-VM) by browsing to port 8080 on your host - for example, http://localhost:8080/phpmyadmin. You can also add your own port forwarding rules between the host and Redmine-VM through the same interface.

Forward ports

You can now mount Redmine directories and copy or move files between your host and Redmine using the Finder. The "Volumes" tab of the stack manager lets you mount and explore directories.

Mount volumes

It's now even easier to run commands on Redmine-VM. From the stack manager page, click the "Open Terminal" button and you'll be logged in to a Redmine-VM console with full root privileges.

You can take the new Redmine-VM for a test drive here.

And remember that installer versions of Redmine for OS X can be downloaded from the downloads page.