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Trac: Setting up a Tracking Solution

Introduction

Trac is a wiki with tracking capabilities in a web environment. It works with Subversion and manages tickets. It also has many other very practical features to discover.

You need to install Subversion (SVN) first. Only then can you use Trac.

Installation

Installing Trac is quite straightforward:

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aptitude install trac enscript python-docutils libapache2-mod-python

Creating a Trac Project

I place my various Trac instances in ~/trac. Run the following commands to create the Trac environment:

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mkdir ~/trac
cd trac
trac-admin project initenv

And answer the few questions asked:

  • Project Name [My Project]> Project
  • Database connection string [sqlite:db/trac.db]> press enter to validate
  • Repository type [svn]> press enter to validate
  • Path to repository [/var/svn/test]> /root/svn/project
  • Templates directory [/usr/share/trac/templates]> press enter to validate

Apache2 Configuration

Now that the Trac project has been created, Apache needs to be configured to make it accessible. Edit your virtualhost file and add the following:

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Alias /trac "/usr/share/trac/htdocs"
ScriptAlias /projet /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi
<location /projet>
    SetEnv TRAC_ENV "/root/trac/projet"
</location>

File Permission Modifications

To make the files accessible by Apache, you need to modify the permissions, similar to what was done for the Subversion repository:

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cd ~/trac
chown -R www-data:www-data projet
chmod 775 projet -R

Creating Trac Users

To connect to Trac, you need to create Trac users. Like for Subversion users, we use the htpasswd2 command:

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cd /etc/apache2
htpasswd -cm dav_svn.passwd pmavro
New password:********
Re-type new password:********
Adding password for user pmavro

And to add another user:

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htpasswd -m dav_svn.passwd anonymous
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user anonymous

You need to edit your virtualhost file again and add the following lines:

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<location /projet/login>
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Trac: login"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
    Require valid-user
</location>

Finalization

To finish, let's add some security to the files containing passwords:

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cd /var/www/trac
chown www-data:www-data *
chmod go-rwx *

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