Trac on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Installing Trac On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (or rebuilds like CentOS4 or ScientificLinux4) is easy with the RPMforge packages from Dag and Dries. If you are not familiar with using these packages, you probably want to read ​http://rpmforge.net/user/faq/ first. If you are using Red Hat's up2date, you will need to download the rpmforge-release at ​http://rpmforge.net/user/packages/rpmforge-release/ and add the following lines to your /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file:

# Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise 4 - i386
yum rpmforge http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/i386/dag/

SELinux note: Please read TracWithSeLinux if you're using SELinux on RHEL4. Basically the default SELinux configuration only allows Apache to read certain directories, so you may need to add trac to the Apache context (man chcon) or turn off SELinux (man setenforce). For more information on SELinux, see ​http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq/. To turn off SELinux edit the /etc/selinux/config file and set SELINUX=disabled

1) After configuring up2date to use the RPMforge repository, run the following command in a terminal window:

  $ up2date -i trac

up2date will take care of all dependencies on which the Trac package depends (including the python-clearsilver package) and will fetch and install them for you automatically. For a full list of what it requires, see the RPM spec file at ​http://dag.wieers.com/packages/trac/trac.spec

2) Create a new project environment. An environment is basically a directory that contains a human-readable configuration file and various other files and directories.

Create a subversion repository if you don't already have one, for example in /srv/svn:

 $ sudo mkdir -p /srv/svn
 $ sudo svnadmin create  --fs-type fsfs /srv/svn

Next you need to decide where to store your trac project and create the directory, for example in the new directory /srv/trac:

 $ sudo mkdir -p  /srv/trac

Then create a new environment using trac-admin, as in this example for project foobar

 $ sudo trac-admin /srv/trac/foobar initenv

Now make it owned by apache:

 $ sudo chown -R apache /srv/trac
 $ sudo chown -R apache /srv/svn

3) Next, you need to edit the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf to point to your new project environment, as in this example (using mod_python):

 <Location /foobar>
   SetHandler mod_python
   PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
   PythonOption TracEnv /srv/trac/foobar
   PythonOption TracUriRoot /foobar
 </Location>
 <Location "/foobar/login">
   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "trac"
   AuthUserFile /src/trac/trac.htpasswd
   Require valid-user
 </Location>

The example above assumes you have a trac project environment setup in /srv/trac/foobar/ directory, described in step 2 and a htpasswd file in /src/trac/trac.htpasswd for authentication purposes (see also wiki:TracModPython).

You will need to restart apache after editing trac.conf:

  $ sudo service httpd restart

Verify your Trac installation by pointing your browser at the correct URL for your Trac server.

If you're installing any trac plugins, keep in mind that RHEL4 ships with Python 2.3. You can also find a python-setuptools rpm at ​http://install.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/yum/CLS/CLSTools.EL4/repodata/index.html

Be sure to check out the generic installation instructions in the TracGuide