Trac on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Installing Trac software and dependencies

Installing Trac On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is relatively easy thanks to ​RPMforge packages from Dag and Dries. Visit ​http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/FAQ.php#B for details on how to configure your server to be able to access RPMforge.

Once you have your server configured to use the RPMforge package repository, installing Trac is accomplished by running:

yum install trac

Configuration overview

This guide will result in the following configuration:

• HTTP requests will be handled by Apache HTTP Server ("Apache"):
• Trac will be run within its own separate and limited user account:
  • No Trac code will be executed inside Apache HTTPD processes;
  • Trac data will be stored within a SQLLite database;
  • All data files are owned/readable/writable only by the dedicated Trac user account;
• HTTP requests will be proxied from Apache to Trac via mod_proxy_ajp.

The rationale for this configuration is:

• We can take advantage of Apache's features such as SSL, and advanced authentication (eg LDAP);
• No extra code or modules that could effect the security or stability of the Apache server are introduced;
• Individual instances of Trac are isolated and can have their resource usage easily measured;
• Multiple versions of Trac could be run if so desired.

If you are dedicating an entire machine to Trac and don't require such high levels of security and stability, you may wish to simply embed Trac in Apache. See TracOnRHEL for an alternative installation guide.

It is assumed that Subversion is already installed/configured and in a working state.

WIP. Should be completed by 23st July 2007.