Running Trac with Gunicorn

Gunicorn (Green Unicorn) is a Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. It's a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

1. Install gunicorn

Gunicorn is a python project which lives on pypi, so we can use easy_install or pip to install gunicorn :

    $> pip install gunicorn

I prefer to use a virtualenv (​http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv), to not have to install gunicorn in a system wide fashion.

2. Write your wsgi file

Gunicorn is WSGI compliant, so then We needneeds a simple python script that work as an entry point:

import sys
import os

sys.stdout = sys.stderr

#put here your ENV's Variables
# here is an example with multiple instances
os.environ['TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR'] = '/home/repos/trac/'
os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/home/repos/projects/.eggs/'

import trac.web.main
application = trac.web.main.dispatch_request

Now, we will test it:

$> gunicorn -w2 tracwsgi:application -b 0.0.0.0:8000
2011-03-04 13:21:10 [14900] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 0.12.0
2011-03-04 13:21:10 [14900] [INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:8000 (14900)
2011-03-04 13:21:10 [14901] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 14901
2011-03-04 13:21:10 [14902] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 14902

Now, launch your web browser, and go to ​http://yourip:8000 and it should work. How it works: gunicorn is looking for a method called "application" in the tracwsgi.py file

3. Configure Nginx

So, now we have Gunicorn running, but we will make it works with nginx which will redirect tracs requests to gunicorn:

upstream trac_gunicorn {
    server unix:///home/repos/projects/run/trac.sock;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name     trac.example.com;
    access_log      /var/log/nginx/trac.access.log;
    error_log       /var/log/nginx/trac.error.log info;


    include         "/etc/nginx/acl.conf";

    location / {
        auth_basic "Secure Login";
        auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/conf/users;

        proxy_pass      http://trac_gunicorn;
    }

    location ~ /(.*?)/chrome/site/ {
        rewrite /(.*?)/chrome/site/(.*) /$1/htdocs/$2 break;
        root    /home/repos/trac.enabled;
    }
}

Note: Nginx will redirect request to a unix socket. It can be a simple ip:port combination. It can be a multiple instance of gunicorn. Take a look in the nginx documentation : ​http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpUpstreamModule

To add a basic or digest authentication, you'll have to provide a file as in the example above, created using htpasswd file. To make gunicorn listen on a unix socket, add this option :

gunicorn -w2 -b unix:///home/repos/projects/run/trac.sock tracwsgi:application

Note: It seems the wsgi entry point does not handle the Digest or Basic http authentication. To ensure the authentication middleware are passed, you'll have to hack a little bit the tracwsgi.py :

import sys
import os

sys.stdout = sys.stderr
os.environ['TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR'] = '/home/repos/trac.enabled/'
os.environ['PYTHON_EGG_CACHE'] = '/home/repos/projects/.eggs/'

from trac.web.standalone import AuthenticationMiddleware
from trac.web.main import dispatch_request
from trac.web.auth import BasicAuthentication
def application(environ, start_application):
    auth = {"*" : BasicAuthentication("/etc/nginx/conf/users", "realm")}
    wsgi_app = AuthenticationMiddleware(dispatch_request, auth)
    return wsgi_app(environ, start_application)