Sweating the Details

Trac is one of the preferred free solutions for project management and issue tracking, and has some really slick SVN integration as well. However, the downside to installing Trac can be substantial, as the installation process is potentially error prone, especially with a shared host such as Dreamhost. This article describes my installation process on DH, and may work for other shared hosts as well.

A very sensible shortcut

Petar Maric has put together a fantastic google-code project that tackles much of this issue head-on, and can be downloaded from his blog.

Afterwards

Having executed the scripts above, I was most of the way there. Trac was up and running, everything was visible, and my SVN commits were catalogued nicely. However, there was one problem: I couldn’t log in no matter what I tried.

The scripts will create a file called <projectname>.passwd in your trac_projects folder, which is a standard htpasswd-style file. Using the htpasswd command, you can add new users for your trac here. Make sure you have a username in the .passwd file that matches the admin username you specified when creating the trac project (the first entry by default). However, none of these users can log in until some changes are made to the .htaccess file in the webroot of your Trac setup. Specifically, it should look something like this:

DirectoryIndex index.fcgi
 
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
 
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Trac"
AuthUserFile /home/<username>/trac_projects/<projectname>/<projectname>.passwd
Require valid-user
 
<ifModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.fcgi/$1 [L]
</ifModule>

Another pitfall

After this, I was confident things were working, but a few days later another user was seeing a string of error messages in the SVN post commit hook revolving around “[Errno 13]Permission denied: ‘/home/<username>/trac_projects/<projectname>/.egg-cache’ “. Python needs this egg cache to be server-writeable, and a quick CHMOD fixed the problem.

Enhancements

Of course, if you are using HTTP rather than HTTPS, you’re going to want to use digest authentication instead of the standard htpasswd. The authentication segment in the .htaccess file is going to look more like this:

AuthType Digest
AuthName "Trac"
AuthDigestFile /home/<username>/trac_projects/<projectname>/<projectname>.passwd
Require valid-user

and you will need to generate your .passwd file using htdigest instead of htpasswd.
That should be all it takes to get Trac going on Dreamhost. Let me know if you have any issues, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks

Thanks to Volker Schoenefeld for tips with Trac!