Trac Installation Guide for OpenSolaris

Trac is a lightweight project management tool that is implemented as a web-based application. Trac is written in the Python programming language and can use SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL as database. For HTML rendering, Trac uses the Genshi templating system.

Note that you should also read the trac/wiki/default-pages/TracInstall documentation file present in the source distribution. If you're upgrading an already installed environment, please also read trac/wiki/default-pages/TracUpgrade.

Requirements

To install Trac, the following software packages must be installed:

• Getting Trac-0.11.7.tar.gz wget http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/trac/Trac-0.11.7.tar.gz
• Python, version ≥ 2.3.
• setuptools, version ≥ 0.6 wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

• Genshi, version ≥ 0.5
• Optionally, Subversion, version ≥ 1.1.x and the Subversion SWIG Python bindings (not PySVN, that's something different).
• One of the following Python bindings, depending on the database used:
  • pysqlite version 2.x for SQLite 3.x (is part of the standard library starting with Python 2.5)
  • psycopg2 version 2.0.x for the PostgreSQL database
  • MySQLdb, version 1.2.2 for the MySQL database
• A web server capable of executing CGI/FastCGI scripts, or Apache HTTPD with mod_python or mod_wsgi. (Trac also comes with a standalone server, tracd)

Any of the above python library can usually be installed using easy_install, which itself can be installed using the following bootstrap script:

$ wget ​http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

$ python ez_setup.py

After that, you can do for example: easy_install Genshi

If you're using Python 2.3 or 2.4 and need pysqlite, you can download from ​http://code.google.com/p/pysqlite/downloads/list the Windows installers or the tar.gz archive for building from source:

$ tar xvfz <version>.tar.gz

$ cd <version>

$ python setup.py build_static install

That way, the latest SQLite version will be downloaded and built into the bindings.

Installing Trac

---

The command:

$ python ./setup.py install

will byte-compile the python source code and install it in the site-packages directory of your python installation. The directories cgi-bin, templates, htdocs and wiki-default are all copied to $prefix/share/trac/.

The script will also install the trac-admin command-line tool, used to create and maintain project environments. Trac-admin is the command center of Trac.

Note: you'll need root permissions or equivalent for this step.

To install Trac in a different location, or use other advanced installation options, run:

$ python ./setup.py —help

Installing Trac on Windows

If you downloaded the Trac installer (the .exe file), installing is simply a matter of running the installer. After running the installer, configuration and installation is the same as for other platforms.

Creating a Project Environment

---

A Trac environment is the backend storage format where Trac stores information like wiki pages, tickets, reports, settings, etc. A Trac environment consists of the environment configuration file (trac.ini), custom templates, log files, and more.

A new Trac environment is created with trac-admin:

$ trac-admin /path/to/projectenv initenv

Note: The user account under which the web server is run needs write permission to the environment directory and all the files inside.

trac-admin will prompt you for the name of the project, where your subversion repository is located, what database you want to use, etc.

Running the Standalone Server

After having created a Trac environment, you can easily try the web interface by running the standalone server tracd:

$ tracd —port 8000 /path/to/projectenv

Then, fire up a browser and visit ​http://localhost:8000/. You should get a simple listing of all environments that tracd knows about. Follow the link to the environment you just created, and you should see Trac in action.

Running Trac on a Web Server

Trac provides three options for connecting to a "real" web server: CGI, FastCGI and mod_python. For decent performance, it is recommended that you use either FastCGI or mod_python.

Please refer to the TracInstall page for details on these setups. You can find it either in the wiki of the Trac project you just created, or on the main Trac site.

Using Trac

Once you have your Trac site up and running, you should be able to browse your subversion repository, create tickets, view the timeline, etc.

Keep in mind that anonymous (not logged in) users can by default access most but not all of the features. You will need to configure authentication and grant additional permissions to authenticated users to see the full set of features.

For further documentation, see the TracGuide wiki page.