trac generates error 500 in case no prermission to conf/trac.ini

[mail@…]

Hi,

I just spend several hours trying to debug a trac problem. Which can be easily reproduced.

I got …

Trac Error

TracError: The Trac Environment needs to be upgraded.

Run "trac-admin /srv/trac upgrade"

Then I realized that by changing the owner of the config file conf/trac.ini it got to work.

To reproduce this do:

root@Apollon:/srv/trac # chown root conf/trac.ini
root@Apollon:/srv/trac # ll conf/trac.ini
-rw------- 1 root apache 6,8K  5. Mai 18:18 conf/trac.ini
root@Apollon:/srv/trac # service httpd restart
httpd beenden:                                             [  OK  ]
httpd starten:                                             [  OK  ]

It does now not work.

root@Apollon:/srv/trac # chown apache conf/trac.ini
root@Apollon:/srv/trac # service httpd restart
httpd beenden:                                             [  OK  ]
httpd starten:                                             [  OK  ]

Now it works again.

I am using Trac 0.12.3dev-r10683.

[Remy Blank]

Yes, that's not a very intuitive error message. We have another ticket for log file permissions, but none for trac.ini AFAICT.

[Christian Boos]

We could also warn against running trac-admin as root? At the very least in the docs (TracEnvironment, TracAdmin), but maybe even at the comment line (e.g. printerr(_("Warning: running as root, modified files might become unreadable by others."))).

[Remy Blank]

Replying to cboos:

We could also warn against running trac-admin as root?

Now that you mention it, that might indeed be a good idea. Funnily enough, I am running trac-admin as root regularly, and have never had an issue.

/me hides in shame

[Christian Boos]

Well, yes, that warning could quickly grow annoying for advanced users. We should rather report in a more explicit way the lack of reading permissions when that happens (we do have a ticket for the trac.ini case, #10044).