Securing tracd with stunnel

I could not find a good tutorial on securing (at least for avoiding plaintext sending of auth) tracd. I would appreciate if others could go over this and confirm, but it seems to work. This is using trac 0.9.2.

Using stunnel-4.14, you can create a tracd configuration file that passes requests on an https port to the port you specify when running tracd. In this manner, your users can access tracd using an ​https:// request, ensuring their requests (and passwords) aren't being sent cleartext.

I put this file in /etc/stunnel/stunnel-tracd.conf:

# Provide the full path to your certificate-key pair file
cert = /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem

# no pid
pid = 

# change the UID and GID of the process for security reasons
setuid = nobody
setgid = nobody

[tracd]
accept  = 8993
connect = 8992

I also added tracd to /etc/services:

tracd       8992/tcp                        # trac web server

You need to create a .pem certificate file, I put it in /etc/stunnel/stunnel.pem. You do this with openssl:

openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -config stunnel.cnf -out stunnel.pem -keyout stunnel.pem

The stunnel.cnf file mentioned here is in the source distribution for stunnel, in the tools subdirectory. It will ask you for your state, country, etc. After it generates the .pem file move it to where the .conf file above indicates.

Now you just need to run stunnel, then tracd:

# /usr/sbin/stunnel /etc/stunnel/stunnel-tracd.conf
# tracd -d --port 8992 --auth [your auth options here!!] [trac_env_directory]

Now trac will be accessible at ​https://url:8993/trac — the requests will be forwarded internally to port 8992, which tracd is listening on. Make sure to apply the patch in ​ticket 2553 as of trac 0.9.2 so that tracd doesn't forward to an http url.