Developer setup for Trac

This tutorial assumes you have SVN installed. If you don't have SVN installed please go to the ​Subversion website and follow the directions of installation there.

Setting up the environment

Before we begin to develop in Trac, or even download Trac code, first create a standalone environment.

Create a working directory

No matter my operating system, I like to create a projects or working directory for my development efforts. So for example on some systems, I might have:

/Users/myname/projects

On Windows I would have:

c:\projects

Note: I don't create a directory called 'trac' yet. That comes later! In the meantime, cd (change directory) to your projects directory.

Get easy_install

Go to ​installing-easy-install and follow the instructions there. However, most of the time you just take the text at ​ez_setup.py, save it as ez_setup.py on your hard drive, then from the command-line prompt type:

python ez_setup.py

Get virtual env

From the command-line prompt type:

easy_install virtualenv

Set up a virtual environment

From the command-line prompt type:

virtualenv trac
cd trac
source bin/activate

You'll see your command-line prompt has changed. That means our environment is ready for Trac.

Installing and configuring Trac

Downloading trac

From the command-line prompt:

svn co http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/trunk/ trac-trunk
svn co http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/genshi/trunk/ genshi-trunk
cd trac-trunk
python setup.py develop 
cd ../genshi-trunk
python setup.py develop
cd ..

Creating your test trac environment

From the command-line prompt:

trac-admin test initenv

note: Press return for every option.

Make anonymous users have full access

trac-admin test permission add anonymous TRAC_ADMIN

note: Don't do this in production!

Installing the trackdeveloperplugin

From the command-line prompt:

svn co http://trac-hacks.org/svn/tracdeveloperplugin/trunk/ tracdeveloperplugin
cd tracdeveloperplugin
python setup.py bdist_egg
cp dist/*.egg ../test/plugins
cd ..

Starting trac in development mode

From the command-line prompt:

tracd -r --port 8000 test

note: The -r command puts Trac into refresh mode so your code changes will show up quickly.

Web stuff

Switch to your browser and go to this URL:

​http://127.0.0.1:8000/test

Now lets follow a few more steps

• Go to web admin
• Hit the admin link
• Logging
  • Set type to console
  • level to debug

Alternative frontend: mod_python

Virtualenv can also be used with Apache and mod_python, but as mod_python will be a system install it will not be aware of the virutalenv without some configuration. For development this is useful as one Apache can serve various development versions in a more permanent way. This method will use the system Python, but will add the libraries from the virtualenv.

Step 1: Make a new frontend script that for instance can be stored in the virtualenv 'bin' directory.

#myvirtualtrac.py

import os
import site
site.addsitedir('/path/to/my/virtualenv/lib/python2.4/site-packages')

from trac.web.modpython_frontend import handler

Step 2: Update Apache config to use this script - add or update options according to the default mod_python setup like for instance found in TracModPython.

# Extend the path so Apache will find your script on path
PythonPath "['/path/to/my/virtualenv/bin'] + sys.path"

# Make mod_python use new frontend instead of trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonHandler myvirtualtrac