Edgewall Software

Version 8 (modified by Christian Boos, 15 years ago) ( diff )

major update for 0.12, removed most of the obsolete stuff

This page documents the 0.12 release. Documentation for other releases can be found here.

Trac Installation Guide for 0.12dev

NOTE: this page is for 0.12dev (trunk), for which development has started. For installing previous Trac versions, please refer to TracInstall (0.11)

Table of Contents

Trac is written in the Python programming language and needs a database, ​SQLite, ​PostgreSQL, or ​MySQL. For HTML rendering, Trac uses the ​Genshi templating system.

Since version 0.12, Trac can also be localized, and there's probably a translation available for your language. If you want to be able to use the Trac interface in other languages, then make sure you have installed the optional package Babel. Pay attention to the extra steps for localization support in the Installing Trac section below. Note Trac can still be installed without Babel, but then you will only get the default english version, as usual.

If you're interested in contributing new translations for other languages or enhance the existing translations, then please have a look at TracL10N.

What follows are generic instructions for installing and setting up Trac and its requirements. While you may find instructions for installing Trac on specific systems at TracInstallPlatforms on the main Trac site, please be sure to first read through these general instructions to get a good understanding of the tasks involved.

Prerequisites

To install Trac, the following software packages must be installed:

  • ​Python, version ≥ 2.4 (we dropped the support for Python 2.3 in this release)
  • ​setuptools, version ≥ 0.6
  • ​Genshi, ​advanced-18n branch, from svn. Note that even if you don't plan to use Babel and i18n support, you'll nevertheless still need that specific Genshi branch, as the templates contain specific tags and attributes which are only correctly interpreted with that version.
  • You also need a database system and the corresponding python drivers for it. The database can be either SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL.

For SQLite

If you're using Python 2.5 or newer, you'll have a bundled version of SQLite and the bindings. If you're using Python 2.4 or you want to use a specific version of SQLite and/or the bindings, you can grab them from:

Note that SQLite v2.x databases are not supported anymore, you need to migrate them to SQLite v3.x.

For details see the PySqlite page.

For PostgreSQL

You need to install the database and its Python bindings:

See DatabaseBackend for details

For MySQL

MySQL support is now good in Trac, provided you follow the guidelines.

See MySqlDb for more detailed information.

Optional Requirements

Version Control System

Subversion

Please note: if using Subversion, Trac must be installed on the same machine. Remote repositories are currently not supported.

  • ​Subversion, version ≥ 1.0. (versions recommended: 1.2.4, 1.3.2 or 1.4.2) and the corresponding Python bindings. For troubleshooting, check TracSubversion
    FIXME upgrade the requirements; it makes no sense to still support 1.0 or even 1.3, as Subversion itself only still supports 1.4.x
    • Trac uses the ​SWIG bindings included in the Subversion distribution, not ​PySVN (which is sometimes confused with the standard SWIG bindings), neither does it support the newer ctype-style bindings
    • If Subversion was already installed without the SWIG bindings, on Unix you'll need to re-configure Subversion and make swig-py, make install-swig-py.
    • There are ​pre-compiled bindings available for win32.
Others

Support for other version control systems is provided via third-parties. See PluginList and VersioningSystemBackend.

Web Server

Other Python Packages

Attention: The various available versions of these dependencies are not necessarily interchangable, so please pay attention to the version numbers above. If you are having trouble getting Trac to work please double-check all the dependencies before asking for help on the MailingList or IrcChannel.

Please refer to the documentation of these packages to find out how they are best installed. In addition, most of the platform-specific instructions also describe the installation of the dependencies. Keep in mind however that the information there probably concern older versions of Trac than the one you're installing (there are even some pages that are still talking about Trac 0.8!).

Installing Trac

One way to install Trac is using setuptools. With setuptools you can install Trac from the subversion repository; for example, to install release version 0.12dev do: 

easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/trunk

But of course the python-typical setup at the top of the source directory also works: 

$ python ./setup.py install

See SubversionRepository for details about getting the source.

Note 1: you'll need root permissions or equivalent for this step.
Note 2: installing from source is the preferred method if you want to have a localized version of Trac

This will byte-compile the python source code and install it as an .egg file or folder in the site-packages directory of your Python installation. The .egg will also contain all other resources needed by standard Trac, such as htdocs and templates.

The script will also install the trac-admin command-line tool, used to create and maintain project environments, as well as the tracd standalone server.

If you want to make Trac available in other languages, make sure you have installed Babel and then run this additional step before doing the install (or simply redo the install afterwards): 

$ python ./setup.py compile_catalog -f

(the -f flag is needed as long as some translations are marked fuzzy, i.e. incomplete, which will most probably be the case during the whole development period, as strings are continuously added or modified)

Advanced Options

To install Trac to a custom location, or find out about other advanced installation options, run: 

easy_install --help

Also see ​Installing Python Modules for detailed information.

Specifically, you might be interested in: 

easy_install --prefix=/path/to/installdir

or, if installing Trac to a Mac OS X system: 

easy_install --prefix=/usr/local --install-dir=/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages

The above will place your tracd and trac-admin commands into /usr/local/bin and will install the Trac libraries and dependencies into /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages, which is Apple's preferred location for third-party Python application installations.

Creating a Project Environment

A Trac environment is the backend storage where Trac stores information like wiki pages, tickets, reports, settings, etc. An environment is basically a directory that contains a human-readable configuration file and various other files and directories.

A new environment is created using trac-admin: 

$ trac-admin /path/to/myproject initenv

trac-admin will prompt you for the information it needs to create the environment, such as the name of the project, the type and the path to an existing source code repository, the database connection string, and so on. If you're not sure what to specify for one of these options, just leave it blank to use the default value. The database connection string in particular will always work as long as you have SQLite installed. Leaving the path to the source code repository empty will disable any functionality related to version control, but you can always add that back when the basic system is running.

Also note that the values you specify here can be changed later by directly editing the TracIni configuration file.

Note: The user account under which the web server runs will require write permissions to the environment directory and all the files inside. On Linux, with the web server running as user apache and group apache, enter:

chown -R apache.apache /path/to/myproject

Running the Standalone Server

After having created a Trac environment, you can easily try the web interface by running the standalone server tracd: 

$ tracd --port 8000 /path/to/myproject

Then, fire up a browser and visit http://localhost:8000/. You should get a simple listing of all environments that tracd knows about. Follow the link to the environment you just created, and you should see Trac in action. If you only plan on managing a single project with trac you can have the standalone server skip the environment list by starting it like this: 

$ tracd -s --port 8000 /path/to/myproject

Running Trac on a Web Server

Trac provides three options for connecting to a "real" web server: CGI, FastCGI, mod_python, mod_wsgi. For decent performance, it is recommended that you use either FastCGI, mod_python or mod_wsgi.

Configuring Authentication

The process of adding, removing, and configuring user accounts for authentication depends on the specific way you run Trac. The basic procedure is described in the Adding Authentication section on the TracCgi page. To learn how to setup authentication for the frontend you're using, please refer to one of the following pages:

Using Trac

Once you have your Trac site up and running, you should be able to browse your subversion repository, create tickets, view the timeline, etc.

Keep in mind that anonymous (not logged in) users can by default access most but not all of the features. You will need to configure authentication and grant additional permissions to authenticated users to see the full set of features.

Enjoy!

The Trac Team

See also: TracGuide, TracCgi, TracFastCgi, TracModPython, TracModWSGI, TracUpgrade, TracPermissions

Note: See TracWiki for help on using the wiki.