I’m using Trac more and more at work and thought I’d do a few posts (mainly for me to remember things) that I thought would be helpful to others just starting out…

Once you have Trac installed setting up a new ‘instance’ of Trac is easy. Everything is done using the command line.

If you simply type in trac-admin at the command line you will get back a long list of available commands with some brief help on each one.

trac-admin

...

initenv
        -- Create and initialize a new environment interactively

initenv
        -- Create and initialize a new environment from arguments

To setup a new instance of Trac we’ll use the initenv command. Modify your path to meet your system.

sudo trac-admin /var/www/trac/projectname initenv

Depending on your environment you may need to change the owner of the newly created Trac directory:

sudo chown -R apache:apache projectname

Upon execution you will be asked a series of questions: Trac name, SVN path, etc. For the most part you can accept the defaults for most of these. They can be changed later either through Trac itself or by editing the trac.ini file (located in /var/www/trac/projectname/conf/trac.ini).

Next I usually adjust permissions on the newly setup Trac. To get a list of existing permissions use the permission command:

sudo trac-admin /var/www/trac/projectname permission list

User              Action
---------------------------------
anonymous         BROWSER_VIEW
anonymous         CHANGESET_VIEW
anonymous         FILE_VIEW
anonymous         LOG_VIEW
anonymous         MILESTONE_VIEW
anonymous         REPORT_SQL_VIEW
anonymous         REPORT_VIEW
anonymous         ROADMAP_VIEW
anonymous         SEARCH_VIEW
anonymous         TICKET_VIEW
anonymous         TIMELINE_VIEW
anonymous         WIKI_VIEW
anonymous         TICKET_CREATE
anonymous         TICKET_MODIFY
anonymous         WIKI_CREATE
anonymous         WIKI_MODIFY

Available actions:
 BROWSER_VIEW, CHANGESET_VIEW, CONFIG_VIEW, FILE_VIEW, LOG_VIEW,
 MILESTONE_ADMIN, MILESTONE_CREATE, MILESTONE_DELETE, MILESTONE_MODIFY,
 MILESTONE_VIEW, REPORT_ADMIN, REPORT_CREATE, REPORT_DELETE, REPORT_MODIFY,
 REPORT_SQL_VIEW, REPORT_VIEW, ROADMAP_ADMIN, ROADMAP_VIEW, SEARCH_VIEW,
 TICKET_ADMIN, TICKET_APPEND, TICKET_CHGPROP, TICKET_CREATE, TICKET_MODIFY,
 TICKET_VIEW, TIMELINE_VIEW, TRAC_ADMIN, WIKI_ADMIN, WIKI_CREATE,
 WIKI_DELETE, WIKI_MODIFY, WIKI_VIEW

You can see ‘anonymous’ has access to everything. Depending on your environment you may want to change that. Changing permissions is easy. Below we are removing the ability for anonymous users to create new tickets and instead switching the permissions to authenticated users. I highly recommend the Web Admin plugin which allows you to adjust permissions from within the Trac interface.

sudo trac-admin /var/www/trac/projectname permission remove anonymous TICKET_CREATE

sudo trac-admin /var/www/trac/projectname permission add authenticated TICKET_CREATE

Usually I set all the create and modify tasks to authenticated.

Next I backup and modify the trac.conf file. Here we are simply telling Apache how to access our new Trac. I’m using Kerberos here at work to authenticate against NT so again your configuration will probably be a bit different.

cp /etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf trac.conf.date (trac.conf.20070122)

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf

SetHandler mod_python
SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/lib/trac
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnv /var/www/trac/projectname
PythonOption TracUriRoot /projectname

AuthType Kerberos
KrbMethodNegotiate Off
KrbMethodK5Passwd On
KrbAuthRealms MYDOMAIN.COM
KrbSaveCredentials off
KrbVerifyKDC off
AuthName "nih"
AuthGroupFile /var/www/svn_passwd
Require group repos

Now we simply restart Apache and things should work! :)

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart