Trac on Etch

From OptionC

"Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects."

We have used it on and off for various small projects, and are given it another try as groupware, since gforge (http://gforge.org/) seemed to be good in a lot of areas, but not necessarily the ones we needed.

Table of contents

1 Basic Trac Install

2 Configuration

2.1 Debian
2.2 Details, details

3 Plugins

4 Recommended Reading

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Basic Trac Install

As of this writing (2006-10-26) the current release is 0.10, which is available in sid/unstable but not etch/testing. As a lot of the plugins that I needed need 0.09 or higher, I went for it.

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add unstable

#/etc/apt/sources.list

Edit create /etc/apt/preferences to set pin priorities (alternatively you can pin to the trac version number; I just went this way because it will work if I need other packages from unstable)

#/etc/apt/preferences

Update and install

apt-get update
apt-get -t unstable install trac

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Configuration

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Debian

The /usr/share/doc/trac/README.Debian file is quite complete, although it doesn't have a full example of the apache configs. As the plugins were a bigger challenge, I'll come back to this later.

Trac for Debian
---------------

This package, which was created initially by Jonas Borgstrom, has been updated
for Debian unstable by Jesus Climent <jesus.climent@hispalinux.es> on July the
22nd.

Trac Installation Guide
=======================
The Trac web-based project management tool is implemented as a server side
cgi-program. Trac is written in the Python programming language and uses SQLite
as an embedded database. For HTML rendering, Trac uses the Clearsilver template
system.

Creating a Project Environment
------------------------------
Trac Environment is the backend storage format where Trac stores information
like wiki pages, tickets, reports, settings, etc. A Trac environment consists of
a directory containing a SQLite database, human-readable configuration file,
log-files and attachments.

Before creating a Trac environment, you need to have a Subversion
repository. This can be made with:

    $ mkdir /path/to/repos
    $ svnadmin create /path/to/repos

A new Trac environment is created with trac-admin:

    $ trac-admin /path/to/projectenv initenv

NOTE: The web server user needs write permission to the environment directory
and all the files inside. After creating the environment you would need to 
execute "chown -R www-data /path/to/projectenv" if trac-admin was executed as
another user.

trac-admin will ask you where your subversion repository is located and where
it can find the trac templates directory (the default value should be fine).

Configuring Apache
------------------
Copy (or symlink) "trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi" to your web server's /cgi-bin/
directory. You can also configure apache to use the "trac/cgi-bin/" directory
directly if you like, it's a matter of taste.

Finally edit the apache config and add this config snippet, with filenams
edited to match your installation:

Alias /trac/ "/usr/share/trac/htdocs/" #or where you installed the trac docs
#You have to allow people to read the files in htdocs
<Directory "/usr/share/trac/htdocs/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>


# Trac need to know where the database is located
<Location "/cgi-bin/trac.cgi">
        SetEnv TRAC_ENV "/path/to/projectenv"
</Location>

# You need this to allow users to authenticate
# trac.htpasswd can be created with 
# cmd 'htpasswd -c trac.htpasswd' (UNIX)
# do 'man htpasswd' to see all the options
<Location "/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/login">
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "trac"
        AuthUserFile /somewhere/trac.htpasswd
        Require valid-user
</location>

Note: When creating a new environment, trac-admin will print a config snippet
customized for your project.

Using Trac
----------
You should now have a working Trac installation at:

http://<yourhostname>/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

There you should be able to browse your subversion repository, create tickets,
view the timeline etc. Keep in mind that anonymous users (not logged in) can
only access a restricted subset of all Trac features.

Please read TracPermissions (in the wiki) to learn how to grant additional
privileges to authenticated users.

For further user-documentation, see TracGuide.

Enjoy!

/The Trac Team

Please also consider joining the mailing list at
<http://lists.edgewall.com/mailman/listinfo/trac/>.

Visit the Trac open source project at <http://trac.edgewall.com/>

Jonas Borgstrom <jonas@edgewall.com>, Sat, 22 May 2004 20:49:22 +0200

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