Installing and Running Trac on Debian

The Debian Sid distribution already contain Trac and all required dependencies. Debian Woody and Sarge users need to add a few lines to their /etc/apt/sources.list before installing Trac.

For Woody:

# Trac, clearsilver, sqlite, pysqlite
deb http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/debian woody trac
# Subversion, Apache2
deb http://people.debian.org/~adconrad woody subversion

For Sarge:

# Trac and clearsilver
deb http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/debian sarge trac

Run

 $ apt-get update

after editing the file to update the package cache.

Installing Trac and the required dependencies should now be as simple as:

 $ apt-get install trac

Note: While installing Trac on Debian Woody you might get some harmless warnings when the installation process byte-compiles some source files.

More notes for Trac 0.8 on Debian Woody:

Notice, this is what worked for me on a new Woody system I built just to host Trac (in a VMware image, yet!), so I was able to be a little free with modifications I made. Be more careful if you are adding Trac to a system you use for other tasks - don't blame me if these instructions break something!

These instructions ignore the above and start at the very beginning.

• Subversion really wants Apache2 installed. If you run apache2 -v and get an error, you'll need to install Apache2. I removed apache 1.3 and installed Apache2 with the following:

  apt-get install apache2-common apache2-doc apache2-mpm-worker libapache2-svn
    apt-get remove apache
    apache2 -k start
  

• Trac 0.8 runs better with Python 2.2 and python-xml (without them, diffs and attachment uploading may not work):

  apt-get install python 2.2 python-xml
  cd /usr/bin
  mv python python.orig
  ln -s python2.2 python
  cp -R /usr/lib/python2.1/site-packages /usr/lib/python2.2
  apache2 -k restart
  

• After completing these pre-requisites, I added the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

  deb http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/debian woody trac
  deb http://people.debian.org/~adconrad woody subversion
  

  and ran

  apt-get install trac 
  

• Getting Subversion working:

I decided to keep my Subversion project at /var/svn/project. Here are the commands I entered to get SVN up and running:

mkdir /var/svn
mkdir /var/svn/project
mkdir /tmp/project
mkdir /tmp/project/branches
mkdir /tmp/project/tags
mkdir /tmp/project/trunk
svnadmin create /var/svn/project
rm -rf /tmp/project
svn import /tmp/project file:///var/svn/project -m "initial import"

I added the following to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default:

  #SVN dir
  <Location /svn>
    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /var/svn
  </Location>

Then I fixed permissions and restarted apache2:

chown /var/svn/nim www-data
chown -R /var/svn/nim/* www-data
apache2 -k restart

I was able to test by going to http://servername.foo.com/svn/project where I could see the empty directories as imported. I did not move on to the next step until this worked right!

• Getting Trac running:

I put my trac environment at /var/trac/project. I'm not using the mod_python extentions at the moment. First I ran

trac-admin /var/trac/project initenv  (will prompt you for several things and print lots of output)

Then I edited /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. I commented out the existing ScriptAlias and <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> directives, and added this at the end:

  Alias /trac "/usr/share/trac/htdocs"
  ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/share/trac/cgi-bin/
  <Location "/cgi-bin/trac.cgi">
            SetEnv TRAC_ENV "/var/trac/project"
  </Location>
  
  <Directory "/usr/share/trac/htdocs">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
  
  # You need something like this to authenticate users
  <Location "/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/login">
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "project"
  AuthUserFile /var/www/trac.htpasswd
  Require valid-user
  </Location>

Now to fix the permissions, add a couple of users, and restart Apache:

cd /var/www
htpasswd -c trac.htpasswd user1     (you'll be prompted for the password)
htpasswd trac.htpasswd bar user2    (you'll be prompted for the password)
apache2 -k restart

Finally, test by going to http://servername.foo.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

On my installation, I do get some errors ("Python C API version mismatch for module blah") when I run trac-admin at the commandline. This is probably because I didn't upgarde to Python2.2 until after I installed Trac. Hopefully these errors will be avoided by upgradng Python first, but in any case they don't seem to hurt Trac at all. Everything works perfectly! bryan@…

Furthermore, there is a guide on building the Debian Trac package from the trunk at TracOnDebianFromTrunk