Edgewall Software

Version 54 (modified by meitarm@…, 16 years ago) ( diff )

Expound upon the virtues and dangers of how to perform page-level customization.

This page documents the 1.4 (latest stable) release. Documentation for other releases can be found here.

Customizing the Trac Interface

Table of Contents

Introduction

This page is meant to give users suggestions on how they can customize the look of Trac. Topics on this page cover editing the HTML templates and CSS files, but not the program code itself. The topics are intended to show users how they can modify the look of Trac to meet their specific needs. Suggestions for changes to Trac's interface applicable to all users should be filed as tickets, not listed on this page.

Project Logo and Icon

The easiest parts of the Trac interface to customize are the logo and the site icon. Both of these can be configured with settings in trac.ini.

The logo or icon image should be put in a folder named "htdocs" in your project's environment folder. (Note: in projects created with a Trac version prior to 0.9 you will need to create this folder)

Note: you can actually put the logo and icon anywhere on your server (as long as it's accessible through the web server), and use their absolute or server-relative URLs in the configuration.

Now configure the appropriate section of your trac.ini:

Change the src setting to site/ followed by the name of your image file. The width and height settings should be modified to match your image's dimensions (the Trac chrome handler uses "site/" for files within the project directory htdocs and "common/" for the common ones). 

[header_logo]
src = site/my_logo.gif
alt = My Project
width = 300
height = 100

Icon

Icons should be a 16x16 image in .gif or .ico format. Change the icon setting to site/ followed by the name of your icon file. Icons will typically be displayed by your web browser next to the site's URL and in the Bookmarks menu. 

[project]
icon = site/my_icon.ico

Note though that this icon is ignored by Internet Explorer, which only accepts a file named favicon.ico at the root of the host. To make the project icon work in both IE and other browsers, you can store the icon in the document root of the host, and reference it from trac.ini as follows: 

[project]
icon = /favicon.ico

Custom Navigation Entries

The new [mainnav] and [metanav] can now be used to customize the text and link used for the navigation items, or even to disable them (but not for adding new ones).

In the following example, we rename the link to the Wiki start "Home", and hide the "Help/Guide". We also make the "View Tickets" entry link to a specific report . 

[mainnav]
wiki.label = Home
tickets.href = /report/24

[metanav]
help = disabled

See also TracNavigation for a more detailed explanation of the mainnav and metanav terms.

Site Appearance

Trac is using ​Genshi as the templating engine. Documentation is yet to be written, in the meantime the following tip should work.

Say you want to add a link to a custom stylesheet, and then your own header and footer. Create a file /path/to/env/templates/site.html or /path/to/inherit/option/templates_dir/site.html, with contents like this: 

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
      py:strip="">

  <!--! Add site-specific style sheet -->
  <head py:match="head" py:attrs="select('@*')">
    ${select('*|comment()|text()')}
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
          href="${href.chrome('site/style.css')}" />
  </head>

  <body py:match="body" py:attrs="select('@*')">
    <!--! Add site-specific header -->
    <div id="siteheader">
      <!--! Place your header content here... -->
    </div>

    ${select('*|text()')}

    <!--! Add site-specific footer -->
    <div id="sitefooter">
      <!--! Place your footer content here... -->
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Note that this references your environment's htdocs/style.css.

Example snippet of adding introduction text to the new ticket form (hide when preview): 

<form py:match="div[@id='content' and @class='ticket']/form" py:attrs="select('@*')">
  <py:if test="req.environ['PATH_INFO'] == '/newticket' and (not 'preview' in req.args)">
    <p>Please make sure to search for existing tickets before reporting a new one!</p>
  </py:if>
  ${select('*')} 
</form>

If the environment is upgraded from 0.10 and a site_newticket.cs file already exists, it can actually be loaded by using a workaroud - providing it contains no ClearSilver processing. In addition, as only one element can be imported, the content needs some sort of wrapper such as a <div> block or other similar parent container. The XInclude namespace must be specified to allow includes, but that can be moved to document root along with the others: 

<form py:match="div[@id='content' and @class='ticket']/form" py:attrs="select('@*')"
        xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <py:if test="req.environ['PATH_INFO'] == '/newticket' and (not 'preview' in req.args)"> 
    <xi:include href="site_newticket.cs"><xi:fallback /></xi:include>
  </py:if>
  ${select('*')} 
</form>

Also note that the site.html (despite its name) can be put in a common templates directory - see the [inherit] templates_dir option. This could provide easier maintainence (and a migration path from 0.10 for larger installations) as one new global site.html file can be made to include any existing header, footer and newticket snippets.

Project List

You can use a custom Genshi template to display the list of projects if you are using Trac with multiple projects.

The following is the basic template used by Trac to display a list of links to the projects. For projects that could not be loaded it displays an error message. You can use this as a starting point for your own index template. 

<!DOCTYPE html
    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
      xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
  <head>
    <title>Available Projects</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Available Projects</h1>
    <ul>
      <li py:for="project in projects" py:choose="">
        <a py:when="project.href" href="$project.href"
           title="$project.description">$project.name</a>
        <py:otherwise>
          <small>$project.name: <em>Error</em> <br /> ($project.description)</small>
        </py:otherwise>
      </li>
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>

Once you've created your custom template you will need to configure the webserver to tell Trac where the template is located (pls verify … not yet changed to 0.11):

For FastCGI: 

FastCgiConfig -initial-env TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR=/parent/dir/of/projects \
              -initial-env TRAC_ENV_INDEX_TEMPLATE=/path/to/template

For mod_python: 

PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /parent/dir/of/projects
PythonOption TracEnvIndexTemplate /path/to/template

For CGI: 

SetEnv TRAC_ENV_INDEX_TEMPLATE /path/to/template

For TracStandalone, you'll need to set up the TRAC_ENV_INDEX_TEMPLATE environment variable in the shell used to launch tracd:

  • Unix 
    $ export TRAC_ENV_INDEX_TEMPLATE=/path/to/template
  • Windows 
    $ set TRAC_ENV_INDEX_TEMPLATE=/path/to/template

Project Templates

The appearance of each individual Trac environment (that is, instance of a project) can be customized independently of other projects, even those hosted by the same server. For Trac 0.11, simply add and/or change the Genshi template files in that project environment's templates folder. For Trac 0.10, simply add and/or change the Clearsilver template files in that project environment's htdocs folder.

For instance, if you are running Trac 0.11 and your project environment directory is /srv/trac/myproject then you can customize myproject's appearance by changing the files found in /srv/trac/myproject/templates. For more information, read the templates/README file.

To make template changes for all projects served by a single installation of Trac, modify the global templates at

Caution: Do not make changes to the Trac installation egg

Though possible, it is considered very bad practice to make global modifications by editing the Trac installation egg directly. Any changes you make here will be overwritten when you update your Trac install and thus lost. The only way to prevent this from happening is to keep a current backup of your changes elsewhere.

The default Trac templates are located in the egg's trac/templates directory (e.g., /usr/lib/pythonVERSION/site-packages/Trac-VERSION.egg/trac/templates). The #ProjectList's template file is called index.html while the theme for the WikiStart page is called theme.html. Page assets such as images and CSS style sheets are located in the egg's trac/htdocs directory. Remember, your changes will be lost upon the next update you perform to your installation and you should thus use the method described in #ProjectList, above, to effect global template customizations.

See also TracGuide, TracIni

Note: See TracWiki for help on using the wiki.