Recipe: Configuring Apache2 on CentOS-4.2 to serve Trac

Getting Trac to work with Apache is not difficult, but there are a number of caveats. We will start with the ​DSO modules for Apache. mod_python is provided for by the default Apache2 configuration on CentOS-4.2. The configuration file is found at /etc/httpd/conf.d/python.conf and, as the settings in the default seem to serve, you can forget about modifying your conf/httpd.conf file for now.

Next, there is the issue of permissions on both the Trac environment and the Subversion repository. I came to the conclusion that it would be best to create separate users and groups forTtrac and Subversion called trac:trac and svn:svn respectively. I then set the ownerships on the Trac environment and subversion repositories to trac:trac and svn:svn. I next added the Apache user as a member to both the Trac and svn groups. This allows Apache to read the files in both these directory structures.

The final bit is to create a file called something like '/etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf' and place the httpd directives for Trac and Python in it. In my case I set up a virtual server called trac.mydomain.tld and put the following lines in a file called '/etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.mydomain.tld.conf':

<VirtualHost *>

DocumentRoot "/var/data/trac"
ServerName trac.mydomain.tld
<Directory "/var/data/trac">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
</Directory>
<Location />
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
   PythonOption TracEnv /var/data/trac
   SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/data/trac/cache
   PythonOption TracUriRoot /
 </Location>
 <Location "/">
   AuthType Digest
   AuthName "tld.mydomain"
   AuthDigestDomain /
   AuthDigestFile /var/data/trac/conf/trac.htdigest
#Should be set to this for the more recent mod_auth_digest:
#   AuthUserFile /var/data/trac/conf/trac.htdigest
   Require valid-user
 </Location>

</VirtualHost>

Note that the Trac environment is located at '/var/data/trac' and that instead of htpasswd I use htdigest and lock down the entire Trac environment from anonymous access.

I had to create the egg.cache inside the Trac environment to avoid permission problems in the /var/www/htdocs directory. The 'TracUriRoot /' is required so that Trac can find its support files like stylesheets and plugins, '/' in this case equates to '/var/data/trac'.

The AuthName directive refers to the realm used when creating the htdigest file for user authentication. The AuthDigestDomain sets the uri covered by controlled access, '/' means the entire site is closed to public viewing. The user password file is created in '/var/data/trac/conf/trac.htdigest' with the htdigest program.

This setup does not yet employ cgi or fastcgi, so it will be slow.