first steps with trac
in a recent little project of my alter ego dotob (website not yet nice and tasty) i wanted to try the project management tool trac from edgewall. its a webbased system written in python. nice because i want to look at python as a scripting language anyway.
so because my webserver is a debian system the installations first steps where easy:
apt-get install trac
after that trac is installed in /usr/share/trac. to create your trac-environment you have to call the admin console program from trac:
trac-admin /var/www/trac initenv
where /var/www/trac is the place where your website will go and initenv is the command to tell trac-admin to initialise a new environment. next i setup apache to serve the new site. there are a bunch of possibilities to let apache server trac: cgi, fastcgi, mod_python etc. i tried cgi and fastcgi first but the mod_python version worked at last. so i need to install mod_phyton:
apt-get install libapache-mod-python
ok got some tips for the site config out of the net. here is my virtualhost-config part:
# Trac Configuration
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName wop.dotob.de
DocumentRoot /var/www/trac/
<Location / >
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
PythonOption TracEnv /var/www/trac/
PythonOption TracUriRoot /
AuthType Basic
AuthName “trac”
# Use the SVN password file.
AuthUserFile /var/svn/.dav_svn.passwd
Require valid-user
</Location>
</VirtualHost>
sorry i assumed you have set your subversion on the same server an it is already up but i wont tell how this is done here. thats said: the /var/svn/.dav_svn.passwd is my subversion authentication file. i use the svn authentication for trac too.
well now trac is up and running. you can use trac-admin, which is a great commandline tool with tab-completion and all to config stuff like when you create a ticket which level of severity are displayed or what the name of your milestones is. what i suggest also is to set some of the user permissions so you can change more stuff via the webinterface.
another thing i wanted is to let trac look into subversion commits an retrieve some information from my commit messages. so assume i have a ticket #5 and i check some fix for that. now i can write “fix #5 introduce new style in xaml” in the commit message and trac will close the ticket #5 with the svn version mentioned and the commit message attached. so how is this done:
subversion uses hook files to let users run scripts. so you go to your subversion repository (assume /var/svn/src) into the directory hooks. rename the post-commit.tmpl to post-commit. than that file is executed by subversion. now you need to insert the code from trac:
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
LOG=`svnlook log -r $REV $REPOS`
AUTHOR=`svnlook author -r $REV $REPOS`
TRAC_ENV='/var/www/woptrac'
/usr/bin/python /usr/share/doc/trac/contrib/trac-post-commit-hook -p "$TRAC_ENV" -r "$REV" -m "$LOG" -u "$AUTHOR"
i found some tutorials where the LOG part was missing but i couldnt get it to work without it. another thing that cost me a lot of time: when you write the commit it didnt work for me to write: “Fixes: #5″. i think the : between the command Fiexs and the #5 was not considered by the scripts regex.
i am curious about using trac. will tell how it behaves.
