=vvvv 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.

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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
  

  Also, edit /etc/default/apache2 so it says NO_START=0 if you want apache2 to run on boot.

• Trac 0.8 runs better with Python 2.2 and python-xml (without them, diffs and attachment uploading will not work). Note that Trac's email notifications will not work unless you have Python 2.2.2 or greater. Since I couldn't find a Debian/stable .deb for anything higher than Python 2.2.1, I gave up on email notifications. Everything else seems to be workng though!

  apt-get install python2.2-xmlbase python2.2-sqlite
  cd /usr/bin
  mv python python.orig
  ln -s python2.3 python
  cp -R /usr/lib/python2.1/site-packages /usr/lib/python2.3
  apache2 -k restart
  

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• Be careful with the above steps. I attempted to follow them on an "existing" (i.e. not fresh) woody box and was unsuccessful in part because I had managed to install a newer version of subversion from source before deciding to try the packages. I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to sarge so I could use the goodness that is apt while also using fsfs repositories. Aside from breaking my pptpd install, the upgrade only partially solved my trac/subversion woes; I was able to get apache2-mod-svn working, but trac-admin from the command line would fail when one of the subversion Python modules went looking for libswig1.3.21 and I had only libswig1.3.22; symlinking libswig1.3.21.so → libswig1.3.22.so solved that problem but left me with another error in fs.py when running trac-admin help from the command line. After much gnashing of teeth, I tried removing the subversion package and the trac package; this triggered an uninstall of several then-unused support packages, including python2.3. However, /usr/lib/python2.3 still existed and was not empty, despite the apt database showing absolutely no python packages of any version installed. I manually rm'd /usr/lib/python2.3, did an aptitude install subversion trac, and stuff worked; I'm fairly convinced that the manual reworkings of the python install (as described above) were directly related, if not causative, in the problem; the fix could have been as simple as:

  aptitude remove subversion trac python2.3
  rm -r /usr/lib/python2.3
  aptitude install subversion trac python2.3
  

  after I had upgraded to sarge. The removal of python2.3 and the rm of /usr/lib/python2.3 are critical; prior to doing this, I had also tried removing subversion and trac and reinstlling, first from binary and then from source packages; that didn't help.

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• 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
svn import /tmp/project file:///var/svn/project -m "initial import"
rm -rf /tmp/project

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 www-data /var/svn/project
chown -R www-data /var/svn/project/*
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

mkdir /var/trac
trac-admin /var/trac/project initenv 
chown -R www-data /var/trac/project

The "trac-admin" command above prompted me to enter the project name, the path to the trac environment, and the path to the Trac templates directory; then it printed out a bunch of stuff.

Next, 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. Apache also logs similar errors. This is probably because I didn't upgrade to Python2.2 until after I installed Trac. Hopefully these errors will be avoided by upgradng Python first (as I have advised above), but in any case they don't seem to hurt Trac at all. Everything (except email notifications which I don't need anyway) works perfectly!

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