Installing Trac with Subversion on Ubuntu
The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to setup a Subversion ↔ Trac environment on Ubuntu 14.04. The original version of this document was written for 10.04, please see the History link for more details.
A MySQL database and Subversion Python bindings are going to be used. Please note that only general instructions are provided, and it's assumed that you have basic knowledge on Linux administration.
Note: for a full installation tutorial on Trac, please read TracInstall
Installation Steps
Installing the software and its dependencies
Base packages
In order to get Trac and Subversion installed, you will need to get a few packages listed below. Also, make sure your system is updated.
sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-python python-setuptools python-genshi mysql-server python-mysqldb
Subversion
Installing Subversion (SVN) is pretty straight forward. Just run:
sudo apt-get install subversion
Trac
There are different ways of installing Trac. But since this tutorial is focused on Ubuntu, you'll do the Ubuntu way:
sudo apt-get install trac
Configuring
This part is maybe the most important section on this tutorial. You'll learn how to synchronize Trac and Subversion in order to be able to see on your Trac Project website what's going on in your repository and also how to automate some tasks.
Creating the Subversion repository for the project
You may already know how to do this, but let's make a review just in case.
Create a directory to store the SVN projects:
sudo mkdir /var/lib/svn
Create a the project directory:
sudo mkdir /var/lib/svn/YourProject
Use svnadmin to create a project in the previously created folder:
sudo svnadmin create /var/lib/svn/YourProject
In order to perform some changes to the project, Trac needs write access to it:
sudo chown -R www-data /var/lib/svn/YourProject
Start the Subversion server (or use your preferred method):
sudo svnserve -d
If you used the command above, you may choose to test that the process is running by issuing:
sudo lsof -i | grep svnserve
This should show something like:
svnserve 13418 root 3u IPv4 675323469 0t0 TCP *:svn (LISTEN)
which means the process svnserve with PID 13418 was run by root and is listening on the svn port, which is by default 3690.
Also, checking out revision 0 should be possible:
svn co svn://localhost/var/lib/svn/YourProject
The above command will create a directory with the name YourProject within your current directory.
Note: until users and authentication have been set up, committing will not be allowed.
Setup the MySQL database
Before configuring your new Trac project, you'll need to setup the MySQL database.
Log into MySQL database, using the root credentials you've setup during the installation:
mysql -u root -p
Once logged in, create the database for Trac:
CREATE DATABASE trac DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;
Now create the username which Trac is going to use to connect to the database:
GRANT ALL ON trac.* TO trac@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';
You can now exit the MySQL command line.
Initialise the Trac environment
Let's create a directory to contain all the Trac project (just like we did for SVN projects).
sudo mkdir /var/lib/trac
Create a directory where to store the Trac project in:
sudo mkdir /var/lib/trac/YourProject
As you did for Subversion, change the ownership of the project files to Apache's user www-data:
sudo chown -R www-data /var/lib/trac/YourProject
Use trac-admin to create the new project:
sudo trac-admin /var/lib/trac/YourProject initenv
This command starts a script that requests some information, like the project name and the MySQL connection string.
The MySQL connection string should look like the following (according to the way we set up the MySQL database in step 2.2).
mysql://trac:yourpassword@localhost/trac
Once this is done, you may check the setup by running tracd:
tracd --port=12345 /var/lib/trac/Apollo
Your browser should show a basic trac install on http://localhost:12345/Apollo.
Notes
You might run into an error when running trac-admin initenv, ending in:
AttributeError: 'NullTranslations' object has no attribute 'add'
For me, making this patch in the listed file solved it.
Pay attention to the question about the location of the Subversion project. This fills the variable repository_dir in trac.ini. Enter the path as discussed before:
/var/lib/svn/YourProject
If the MySQL default engine wasn't InnoDB, you might need to convert the tables that trac-admin has just created. Issue the following within your MySQL client:
USE trac; \ ALTER TABLE `attachment` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `auth_cookie` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `cache` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `component` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `enum` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `milestone` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `node_change` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `permission` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `report` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `repository` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `revision` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `session` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `session_attribute` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `system` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `ticket` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `ticket_change` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `ticket_custom` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `version` ENGINE = InnoDB; \ ALTER TABLE `wiki` ENGINE = InnoDB;
Explicit synchronization of trac and svn
Note: For more information about the Explicit Synchronization method, please read TracRepositoryAdmin#ExplicitSync
First, edit the trac.ini file, located in /var/lib/trac/YourProject/conf/. Modify the repository_sync_per_request directive and set it to an empty value.
Now you need to create the Subversion hooks. First, create the post-commit hook in the /var/lib/svn/YourProject/hooks/ directory, with the following content:
#!/bin/sh export PYTHON_EGG_CACHE="/path/to/cache/dir" /usr/bin/trac-admin /var/lib/trac/YourProject changeset added "$1" "$2"
Make sure you give the script execution permissions:
sudo chmod +x /var/lib/svn/YourProject/hooks/post-commit
Another important hook script to have is post-revprop-change. The procedures are similar, but the script is slightly different:
#!/bin/sh export PYTHON_EGG_CACHE="/path/to/cache/dir" /usr/bin/trac-admin /var/lib/trac/YourProject changeset modified "$1" "$2"
Again, make sure you give exec permissions to the script.
Now Trac will be notified about changes you make to your repository and will make them available in the timeline.
Instructing Apache to handle Trac
Create a new site for your Trac setup.
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/trac.conf
Apache needs to know how to handle Trac. Use the following block to set up Trac handling:
<Location /projects> #set up Trac handling
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/lib/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /projects
</Location>
Note that it's pointing to the main Trac directory. It means it will expose all of your Trac projects. You may need to apply this configuration to Apache, then reload the server:
sudo a2ensite trac sudo service apache2 reload
Authentication
Make sure that the apache2-utils package is installed to use htpasswd.
In order to allow users to log in to Trac, you will need the following section in your Apache configuration:
<LocationMatch "/projects/[^/]+/login">
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Trac"
AuthUserFile /var/lib/trac/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>
You should now create the .htpasswd file, with an admin user:
sudo htpasswd -c .htpasswd admin
Go ahead and restart Apache:
sudo service apache2 restart
Finally, you must grant admin rights to the user you've just created:
sudo trac-admin /var/lib/trac/YourProject permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN
Automatic reference to the SVN changesets in Trac tickets
Something useful is to reference tickets on your commits. That way you can keep a better track of them and also easily access them from the timeline.
Make sure you have the following lines in your trac.ini configuration file:
[components] tracopt.ticket.commit_updater.* = enabled
Now, whenever you commit some change related to a ticket, use Refs #tn to reference this changeset in #tn ticket. For example:
svn commit -m "Refs #123 - added this and that"
In order to mark a ticket as fixed, use the following:
svn commit -m "Fixes #123 - Removed an infinite loop which was causing the application to freeze"
