Install Trac on Ubuntu proxied by Nginx

This is a guide on how to install and run a single hosted Trac project from ​https://trac.edgewall.org with Nginx as the proxy server.

This guide should apply for the following Debian-based Linux distributions:

• Debian 9
• Ubuntu 16.04
• Ubuntu 16.10
• LinuxMint 18.1
• LinuxMint 18.2

Here is a somewhat basic copy paste bash script for this. However, there will be some manual steps, but a find+replace will help a lot. Be aware you might run all of these commands with the sudo -H.

Notice: Remember to replace the https://trac-hacks.org/svn/fullblogplugin/0.11 with the plugin's ​latest verion.

apt-get install subversion libapache2-mod-python pypy python python-babel trac python-pip -y
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade Babel
pip install --upgrade Trac
pip install --upgrade pillow
pip install dnspython
pip install spambayes
pip install oauth2
pip install httplib2
pip install TracTags
pip install TracSpamFilter 
pip install TracVote
easy_install --always-unzip https://trac-hacks.org/svn/fullblogplugin/0.11
mkdir -p /var/www/trac/

trac-admin /var/www/trac initenv

Follow the trac-admin guide.

Now lets test the Trac installation before we do anything else:

tracd --port 8000 /var/www/trac
lynx localhost:8000/trac

If it's working, then it's time to setup a admin user and password for the admin account. If it doesn't work, then that is beyond this wiki and you'll need to consult internet resources for a solution.

Run the following to create the admin user:

htpasswd -c /var/www/trac/.htpasswd adminusername
trac-admin /var/www/trac/ permission add adminusername TRAC_ADMIN

Replace adminusername with your desired username.

Next we set the proper user and group permissions on the Trac folder to allow the Nginx/Apache/Trac server to access it:

chown -R UserName:GroupName /var/www/trac/
chmod -R 775 /var/www/trac/

Preparation to Enable Git source

To enable git source browsing via Admin we need another subfolder:

mkdir -p /var/www/trac/git

Systemd startup script

In your /etc/systemd/system/ make this new file:

nano /etc/systemd/system/tracd.service

Then add the following to your trac.ini file:

[Unit]
Description = TrackD Daemon
After = network.target

[Service]
ExecStart = /usr/local/bin/tracd -p 3050 --protocol=http --basic-auth="*,/var/www/trac/.htpasswd,Restricted" -s /var/www/trac
Type = simple
User = UserName
Group = GroupName

[Install]
WantedBy = multi-user.target

Nginx configurations

Now it's time to do the NginX configurations.

First we have to make a reverse proxy to the Trac daemon we have made in Systemd startup script.

In the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf we'll have to add a upstream for our reverse_proxy to Trac:

  upstream live_trachosts_com {
        server  127.0.0.1:3050;
  }

Now make the site.conf file in your preferred location, which by default would be /etc/nginx/conf.d/, for other it would be in /etc/nginx/sites-available but we go whit the default nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/site.conf:

server {
  listen       123.123.123.123:80;
  server_name  trac.local;
  
  charset utf8;
  access_log  /var/log/nginx/trac.access.log;
  error_log  /var/log/nginx/trac.debug.log;

  location / {
    proxy_pass  http://live_trachosts_com;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
  }
  
  # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
  #
  error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
  location = /50x.html {
      root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
  }

  # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
  # concurs with nginx's one
  #
  location ~ /\.ht {
      deny  all;
  }
}

Apache

If you are using Apache as the webserver, then run the following:

a2enmod python
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/trac.conf

It should have the following content:

<VirtualHost 123.123.123.123:80>
 ServerName trac.local
 <Location />
  SetHandler mod_python
  PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
  PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
  PythonOption TracEnv /var/www/trac
  PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/www/trac
  PythonOption TracUriRoot /
  PythonOption TracEnv /var/www/trac
  # PythonOption TracEnvIndexTemplate /var/www/trac/templates/index-template.html
  PythonOption TracLocale en_US.UTF8
  PythonOption PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /tmp
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
 </Location>
 <Location /login>
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "myproject"
  AuthUserFile /var/www/trac/.htpasswd
  Require valid-user
 </Location>
</VirtualHost>

To enable the Trac site run a2ensite trac.conf.

Find/Replace

The following paths is to be replaced with your preferences:

• /var/www/trac: /full/path/to/trac
• adminusername: YourUserName to be used as the track admin
• UserName: The username for which trac daemon runs as ex. Your login UserName
• GroupName: The group name for which trac daemon runs as ex www-data
• trac.local: full.domain.tld
• live_trachosts_com: to what suits your needs
• 123.123.123.123: if you are running both NginX and Apache on port 80/443, then you'll need to set the IP, but if you only run Nginx or Apache you can delete the IP address to listen on all addresses

Versions

In this tutorial I have used the following software versions:

$ uname -a
Linux hostname 4.11.0-14-generic #20~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Aug 9 09:06:22 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ tracd --version
tracd 1.2.2
$ nginx -v
nginx version: nginx/1.13.6

Which list

A complete HOWTO copy/paste guide to make Nginx running as "Front-end" of Trac.