Trac and Apache suEXEC

Trac in CGI-mode doesn't play very well with ​Apache suEXEC.

Setting the TRAC_ENV environment variable as described in TracInstall will not work when using suEXEC feature because the environment variables are filtered and only a limited subset reaches the CGI program.

There are obvious workarounds to make things work:

1. Recompile suexec to let it pass the TRAC_ENV variable; which requires root permissions and is not really advisable anyway.
2. Change our trac.cgi script to set the TRAC_ENV variable by itself, to do this we edit trac.cgi file and add

   import os;os.environ['TRAC_ENV'] = '/path/to/projectenv'
   

   at the very beginning of the script.
3. Make a wrapper script

   #!/bin/bash
   
   export TRAC_ENV='/path/to/projectenv'
   exec /path/to/trac/trac.cgi
   

Note: This is a kludge, but works.

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Multiple Projects under suEXEC

When hosting multiple projects under suEXEC, you can either copy the CGI script and change the TRAC_ENV setting for each script, or make a wrapper script around it.

Here's a contributed script to work around the stripping of environment variables done by suEXEC.

 #!/bin/bash
 user="marcenuc" 

 prj="${PATH_INFO#/}" 
 prj="${prj%%/*}" 
 export TRAC_ENV="/home/${user}/.trac/prj/${prj}" 
 export SCRIPT_NAME="/~${user}/prj/${prj}" 
 export PATH_INFO="${PATH_INFO#/${prj}}" 
 export PYTHONPATH="/home/${user}/sw/lib/python2.3/site-packages" 
 exec ./trac.cgi 

Multiple Projects under Plesk/suEXEC/same domain

Added by torgny at sbbs.se

The above script works well if you want to have a Trac instance for each user, but it does not really help if you have several projects under the same site. In order to solve this under Linux Red Hat with Plesk, I did the following:

First, from the Apache configuration (vhost.conf in this case), replace DOMAIN with the domain you are adding:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/projects/+$                                    /projects/index.php  [L]
RewriteCond /home/httpd/vhosts/DOMAIN/private/tracs/$1  -d
RewriteRule ^/projects/([^/]+)(/?.*)                         /projects/wrap.cgi$2 [S=1,E=TRAC_ENV:/home/httpd/vhosts/DOMAIN/private/tracs/$1]
RewriteRule ^/projects/(.*)                                  /projects/index.php

Alias /trac/ /usr/share/trac/htdocs/

<Directory "/usr/share/trac/htdocs">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<Directory "/home/httpd/vhosts/DOMAIN/httpdocs/projects">
    AllowOverride None
    Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<LocationMatch "/projects/[[:alnum:]]+/login">
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Trac"
    AuthUserFile /home/httpd/vhosts/DOMAIN/private/.htpasswd_trac
    Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>

And after that, add the folder to ~/httpdocs/projects.

In that folder, either symlink trac.cgi or place a copy, and add index.html.

Index.php acts as the default page when a project without an existing Trac environment is requested.

Now, for the wrap.cgi bash script:

#!/bin/bash
project="${SCRIPT_NAME#/projects/}"
export TRAC_ENV="/home/httpd/vhosts/DOMAIN/private/tracs/${project}"
export SCRIPT_NAME="/projects/${project}"
export PATH_INFO="${PATH_INFO#/${SCRIPT_NAME}}"
exec ./trac.cgi

The script above does all the work-around magic to make sure everything works between suEXEC and Trac in CGI mode. It also gives you multiple projects support.

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See also: TracInstall, TracMultipleProjects