Redmine

I believe I was able to do this pretty well on my own, and I think it's safe and general-purpose enough that it should be made part of basic Redmine functionality. Here's what I did:

1. Add to settings table a value filesystem_base_path.

2. /config/settings.yml needs to describe this value, so somewhere along the way make sure it includes:

filesystem_base_path:
  default: ''

3. /locales/ needs a string to use as a label. In my case, I updated en.yml by finding where the 'setting_' entries all were and adding:

setting_filesystem_base_path: Filesystem base path

4. /app/views/settings/_repositories.html.erb is the Administrative settings panel for repositories, and a good place to add a field for users to set this value. Wherever you'd like, add the field (I just duplicated the repository_log_display_limit field):

<p><%= setting_text_field :filesystem_base_path, :size => 6 %></p>

5. /lib/redmine/scm/adapters/filesystem_adapter.rb is where the magic happens. Toward the very beginning, you'll find a line that reads:

@url = with_trailling_slash(url)

There may be better places or better code for this step, but I modified this line to read:

@url = with_trailling_slash(Setting.filesystem_base_path) + with_trailling_slash(url)

This concatenates the base path value and the individual repository's location, and makes sure there's a slash at the end of your base path before doing so.

And unless I missed one of my steps, that should do it. You now have a setting restricted to administrators to set a global base path for file system repositories.

This is an under-used and under-appreciated module, but can be ridiculously powerful. A great example would be anyone using a newer version of the DMSF plugin with WebDAV enabled: have your Redmine server mount itself at the WebDAV root (http://redmine/dmsf/webdav) using admin credentials and set that mount point as your base path. Now from any project, add a file system repository and simply use the project identifier as the repository path, gaining access to many separate DMSFs from one project point and give the finger to duplication.