Installing Trac with Subversion on Ubuntu

The goal of this tutorial is to demostrate how to setup a Subversion ↔ Trac enviroment on Ubuntu 11.04. A MySQL database and Subversion Python bindings are going to be used. Please note that only general instructions are provided, and it's asummed that you have basic knowledge on Linux administration.

Note: for a full installation tutorial on Trac, please read TracInstall

Installation Steps

1. Installing the software and its dependencies
   1. Base packages
   2. Subversion
   3. Trac
2. Configuring
   1. Subversion
   2. Setup the MySQL database
   3. Trac
   4. Apache
3. Workflow examples

Installing the software and its dependencies

Base packages

In order to get Trac and Subversion installed, you will need to get a few packages listed below. Also, make sure your system is updated.

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-python python-setuptools python-genshi mysql-server python-mysqldb

Subversion

Installing Subversion (SVN) is pretty straight forward. Just run:

sudo apt-get install subversion

Trac

There are different ways of installing Trac. But since this tutorial is focused on Ubuntu, you'll do the Ubuntu way:

sudo apt-get install trac 

Configuring

This part is maybe the most important section on this tutorial. You'll learn how to syncronize Trac and Subversion in order to be able to see on your Trac Project website what's going on in your repository and also how to automate some tasks.

Subversion

Creating the project

You may already know how to do this, but let's make a review just in case.

Create a directory to store the SVN projects:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/svn

Create a the project directory:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/svn/YourProject

Use svnadmin to create a project in the previously created folder:

sudo svnadmin create /var/lib/svn/YourProject

In order to perform some changes to the project, Trac needs write access to it:

sudo chown -R www-data /var/lib/svn/YourProject

Setup the MySQL database

Before installing Trac, you'll need to setup the MySQL database.

Log into MySQL database, using the root credentials you've setup during the installation:

mysql -u root -p

Once logged in, create the database for Trac:

CREATE DATABASE trac DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

Now create the username which Trac is going to use to connect to the database:

GRANT ALL ON trac.* TO trac@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';

You can now exit the MySQL command line.

Trac

Initiate the enviroment

Let's create a directory to contain all the Trac project (just like we did for SVN projects).

sudo mkdir /var/lib/trac

Create a directory where to store the Trac project in:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/trac/YourProject

As you did for Subversion, change the ownership of the project files to Apache's user www-data:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/trac/YourProject

Use trac-admin to create the new project:

sudo trac-admin /var/lib/trac/YourProject initenv

You will need to fill in some information, like the project name. Also, it will ask you for the MySQL connection string. Input the following (according to the way we did setup the MySQL database in the step 2.2).

mysql://trac:yourpassword@localhost/trac

If the MySQL default engine wasn't InnoDB, you might need to convert the tables tha trac-admin has just created. Issue the following:

ALTER TABLE `attachment` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `auth_cookie` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `cache` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `component` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `enum` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `milestone` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `node_change` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `permission` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `report` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `repository` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `revision` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `session` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `session_attribute` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `system` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `ticket` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `ticket_change` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `ticket_custom` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `version` ENGINE = InnoDB; \
ALTER TABLE `wiki` ENGINE = InnoDB;

Explicit syncronization

Automatic reference to the SVN changesets in Trac tickets

Apache

Set up Trac handling

Authentication

Workflow examples