Trac on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Installing Trac Software and Dependencies

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 clearsilver, guile, neon, perl-URI, python-clearsilver, python-sqlite, sqlite, subversion, and swig packages) 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

Configure Subversion

Before we can create a new trac environment we must first have a working subversion repository if we are going to get the full use out of trac. Create a subversion repository if you don't already have one, for example in /srv/svn:

 $ mkdir -p /srv/svn
 $ 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:

 $ mkdir -p  /srv/trac

Creating an Environment

A new Trac environment is created using trac-admin:

$ trac-admin /path/to/projectenv initenv

trac-admin will ask you for the name of the project, the database connection string (explained below), and the type and the path to your source code repository.

Note: The web server user will require file system write permission to the environment directory and all the files inside. Please remember to set the appropriate permissions. The same applies to the Subversion repository Trac is eventually using, although Trac will only require read access as long as you're not using the BDB file system.

Database Connection Strings

Since version 0.9, Trac supports both ​SQLite and ​PostgreSQL as database backends. The default is to use SQLite, which is probably sufficient for most projects. The database file is then stored in the environment directory, and can easily be backed up together with the rest of the environment.

The connection string for an embedded SQLite database is:

sqlite:db/trac.db

Source Code Repository

You'll first have to provide the type of your repository (e.g. svn for Subversion, which is the default), then the path where the repository is located.

If you don't want to use Trac with a source code repository, simply leave the path empty (the type information doesn't matter, then).

Example of a configuration for a Subversion repository:

[trac]
repository_type = svn
repository_dir = /path/to/your/repository

Directory Structure of Trac Environment

An environment directory will usually consist of the following files and directories:

• README - Brief description of the environment.
• VERSION - Contains the environment version identifier.
• attachments - Attachments to wiki pages and tickets are stored here.
• conf
  • trac.ini - Main configuration file. See TracIni.
• db
  • trac.db - The SQLite database (if you're using SQLite).
• plugins - Environment-specific plugins (Python eggs)
• templates - Custom environment-specific templates.
  • site_css.cs - Custom CSS rules.
  • site_footer.cs - Custom page footer.
  • site_header.cs - Custom page header.
• wiki-macros - Environment-specific Wiki macros.

Note: don't confuse a Trac environment directory with the Source Code Repository directory. It happens that the above structure is loosely modelled after the Subversion repository directory structure, but they are not and must not be located at the same place.

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:

  $ /sbin/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

Now make it owned by apache:

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