Trac

So here we are again this time to talk about "Trac" an integrated SCM and project management tool. I love this tool even though at first glance it could result a bit simplistic. The philosophy is quite clear and if you make a good usage of the tool you will be implementing plenty of recognized good practices on the software engineering even without notice it. Here you can find the original site with a lot of information, tutorials, etc.. As usual, I will focus on this tutorial on how install it and make it works, but I do not discard a future where we will integrate our source code within Trac and create a bunch of online documentation for it.

I will explain two different approaches, the classical one when we have root privileges, and a very particular one by downloading the sources and installing it without root permissions.

A. Install Trac in the classical way.


1. Install easy_install tool (More information here):

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

2. Install Genshi, a web-template based tool that Trac is based on: (More information here.)

sudo easy_install Genshi

3. Install the python connector that will allows Trac to communicate with a MySQL Database.

sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb

4. Install Babel, the internationalization engine that Trac is based on:

sudo easy_install Babel==0.9.5

5. And finally... Install Trac!!

sudo easy_install Trac

6. If you want to use Trac with a MySQL Database, you will need to create a Database called trac and provide the needed privileges for the user 'tracuser' from MySQL monitor (More information about how to install and use MySQL on this previous blog):

CREATE DATABASE trac DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin; 

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

If you are installing Trac in the same server that MySQL is installed, your connection query should be something like this:

mysql://tracuser:administrador@localhost/trac

If you are installing it in a different server you will have to change 'localhost' by the IP of the server were MySQL is installed

7. Create a directory where the configuration files of your Trac site will be stored e.g.  /var/trac/testsite

8. Execute initenv command indicating the directory created in the previous step (You will be asked for several paramenters, including  the connection query retrieved on the step 6) :

sudo trac-admin /var/trac/testsite initenv 

The main configuration field of your site is found here:

/var/trac/testsite/conf/trac.ini

You can run a built-in server to start playing with your just installed tool:

sudo tracd --port 8000 /var/trac/testsite 

After doing that you should be able to browse your site:

Fig.1 Our first Trac Project

Finally I would like to mention a very interesting command that will provide the default user Administrator privileges over the whole site.

sudo trac-admin /var/trac/testsite permission add anonymous TRAC_ADMIN

B. Install Trac from the sources


1. Install Python

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.7/Python-2.6.7.tgz
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/Python-2.6.7/Lib
tar -xvf Python-2.6.7.tgz

2. Install easy_install tool

wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg#md5=bfa92100bd772d5a213eedd356d64086
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/javier/bin/EasyInstall
sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg  --install-dir=~/bin/EasyInstall
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/EasyInstall

3. Install Genshi

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:~/app/Genshi
easy_install --install-dir=~/app/Genshi/ Genshi


4. Install Babel

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:~/app/Babel
easy_install --install-dir=~/app/Babel/ Babel

5. Install Trac

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:~/app/Trac
easy_install --install-dir=~/app/Trac/ Trac
./trac-admin ~/tracsites/ initenv
./tracd --port 8000 ~/tracsites/ initenv