Redmine Email Notifications on Ubuntu 10.04 Server
Redmine is such a cool issue tracker, that I’ve had to give it a shot.
Unfortunately, even on ubuntu server, where apt-get is supposed to make life easy, it’s by no means trivial to setup.
I’d like to give a suggestion on how to make email notifications work.
First of all, Ubuntu (10.04) installs redmine (0.9.3) with passenger.
Normally, you’d try to go to and you get a disappointing:
Email delivery is not configured, and notifications are disabled. Configure your SMTP server in config/email.yml and restart the application to enable them.
No problem, google for email.yml, fix the settings for my gmail account and restart the application.
At first I thought that I’m not restarting redmine. I’ve tried the following (passenger way of restarting rails app):
(in /usr/share/redmine): touch tmp/restart.txt
as well as multiple ways of apache restaring on ubuntu with no success in loading my email.yml.
Finally found a clue here: http://www.redmine.org/boards/2/topics/4240
In config/environment.rb, setting
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = false
must be changed to
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
despite the comment claim that having email.yml in place is enough and this flag should always be false (why is it there then, huh?).
Then I’ve figured out that gmail support was also not trivial at all. I’ve tried different suggestions on how to make use of an existing gmail account with no success.
Finally, I gave up and setup exim4 (thoroughly described here: ) which happened to be smooth and worked out of the box.
