Anyway, I’ve compiled this How To together for others that may be having difficulties. These are the exact steps and commands that I ran in my ssh session to get everything up and running. All the code snippets are ready to run, so just copy & paste them into your terminal. After you’re done you should hopefully have a working Trac site, with the bonus of a working subversion.

The following are a list of sites that I managed to pull my information from:

• http://heidisoft.com/blog/installing-trac-hostmonster-or-bluehost
• http://fitri.manzanisimo.net/2008/05/23/hostmonster-python-25-subversion-14-django-svn-mysqldb-fcgid/

The Requirements

These are mainly pulled from the Trac requirements

• Linux
• Apache
• SSH access

Everything else that is required will be installed and setup in the following steps.

The Goods

First setup the three directories that we’ll be using throughout this How To. It’s best to create these directories in your ~/home directory.

mkdir install_files
mkdir svn
mkdir trac_sites
mkdir packages

Pretty self-explanatory, install_files will be a location where you’ll download all the needed files to, svn will be where you will house all your projects under version control, trac_sites is the location where the Trac projects will be stored, and finally packages will be where we are going to install and run all the needed scripts.

Setting Your Environment

There are a couple files that you will need to modify. The first is to add a few variables to your ~/.bash_profile.

export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/packages/lib/python2.5/site-packages"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/packages/lib"
export PATH="$HOME/packages/bin:$PATH"

Save the file and then run.

source ~/.bash_profile

Next is your ~/.bashrc file, just add the following line to the end.

PATH=~/packages/bin:$PATH

Save the file and then run.

source ~/.bashrc

These will setup all the needed references for the following steps.

Installing Python

Trac requires python in order to run, so I decided to install version 2.5.2. I chose this version because it already includes the SQLite database, which is another requirement of Trac. First, make sure you’re in the install_files directory then run:

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.2/Python-2.5.2.tar.bz2
tar xjf Python-2.5.2.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.5.2
make clean
./configure --prefix=$HOME/packages
make && make install
cd ..

Installing Clearsilver

You should be back in the ~/install_files directory. If you’re not, navigate yourself back so you are for the next step. Clearsilver is part of the templating system that Trac uses. Because I went with version 2.5.2 of Python you need to make sure that you install version 10.4+ of Clearsilver.

wget http://www.clearsilver.net/downloads/clearsilver-0.10.4.tar.gz
tar zxf clearsilver-0.10.4.tar.gz
cd clearsilver-0.10.4
make clean
sed -i "s@/usr/local/bin/python@/usr/bin/env python@g" \
scripts/document.py
PYTHON_SITE=`$HOME/packages/bin/python -c \
"import sys; print [path for path in sys.path if \
path.find('site-packages') != -1][0]"` \
./configure --with-python=$HOME/packages/bin/python \
--prefix=$HOME/packages \
--disable-ruby --disable-java --disable-apache --disable-csharp --disable-perl
make && make install
cd ..

Installing easy_install

This will setup and install the Python module easy_install. Trac uses this command frequently to install additional plugins and addons. Again, make sure you’re in the ~/install_files directory.

wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py --prefix=$HOME/packages

Installing SWIG

SWIG are the bindings that Trac uses to work and communicate with Subversion.

wget http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/swig/swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
tar zxf swig-1.3.31.tar.gz
cd swig-1.3.31
make clean
./configure --prefix=$HOME/packages
make && make install
cd ..

Installing Subversion

Setting up Subversion is a little more difficult than the other packages.  I had a difficult time getting everything to work properly with Trac. First, I needed to make sure that I had the dep package for Subversion as well. These included the tools to communicate with Apache (apr, apr-util, and neon). However, even after configuring the package with the dep tools, I was still getting an error when trying to use Subversion. The solution turned out that I needed to compile the tools separately prior to compiling Subversion. I’ve already taken the liberty of breaking out those steps for you here. But first, let’s get the Subversion files… you are again in the ~/installed_files directory, right?

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.bz2
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.bz2
tar xjf subversion-1.4.6.tar.bz2
tar xjf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.bz2
cd subversion-1.4.6

apr

cd apr
make clean
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME/packages
make && make install

apr-util

cd ../apr-util
make clean
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME/packages \
--with-expat=builtin --with-apr=$HOME/packages \
--without-berkeley-db
make && make install

neon

cd ../neon
make clean
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME/packages \
--with-libs=$HOME/packages --with-ssl
make && make install

and finally, subversion

cd ..
make clean
./configure --prefix=$HOME/packages --without-berkeley-db \
--with-editor=/usr/bin/vim --with-apr=$HOME/packages \
--with-apr-util=$HOME/packages --with-neon=$HOME/packages \
--with-swig=$HOME/packages/bin/swig \
--with-ssl --with-zlib --with-expat=builtin
make && make install
make swig-py && make install-swig-py
cd ~/packages/lib/python2.5/site-packages
echo $HOME/packages/lib/svn-python > subversion.pth
ln -s ~/packages/lib/svn-python/libsvn
ln -s ~/packages/lib/svn-python/svn
python -c "from svn import client"
cd ~/install_files

Note: At times I would get errors when compiling these packages. I’m not sure why, but if I ran the make and make install on separate lines, it seemed to fix the issue.

Create your first repository

Just run the following command to create a new repository. Replace the {rep_name} with whatever you’d like to call your project.

svnadmin create $HOME/svn/{rep_name}

Installing Trac

For this How To I decided to go with version 0.10.4 of Trac. I attempted to try for version 0.11 but I had difficulty logging in to administer the site and never found a solution to the problem.

wget http://ftp.edgewall.com/pub/trac/trac-0.10.4.tar.gz
tar zxf trac-0.10.4.tar.gz
cd trac-0.10.4
python setup.py install --prefix=$HOME/packages
cd ..

Creating your first environment

The next few commands will help you setup your first environment, including setting up permissions. For this, I’ve gone with a pretty strict set of permissions. I only want users that I give access to, to be able to view my source code and edit the wiki pages. You can, of course, set it up however you would like. Replace {trac_env} with whatever environment name you would like.

trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} initenv

Permissions

trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission remove anonymous '*'
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission remove authenticated '*'
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add {admin_username} admin
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add anonymous WIKI_VIEW
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add authenticated ROADMAP_VIEW WIKI_MODIFY
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add authenticated TICKET_VIEW TICKET_CREATE
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add authenticated REPORT_VIEW MILESTONE_VIEW
trac-admin $HOME/trac_sites/{trac_env} permission add {authenticate_username} authenticated

Installing Trac Modules

There are a lot of modules out there that expand Trac to do quite a bit beyond it’s initial setup. I’ve only needed three additional modules, WebManager, AccountManager and Pygments.

WebManager

This is a MUST! Allows you to manage the Trac environment and settings directly from the web.

svn co http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/sandbox/webadmin/
cd webadmin
python setup.py egg_info
python setup.py bdist_egg
cd dist
easy_install --prefix=$HOME/packages *.egg
cd ~/install_files

AccountManager

Better handles the login and users of the Trac environment to the web.

svn co http://trac-hacks.org/svn/accountmanagerplugin/0.10 accountmanagerplugin
cd accountmanagerplugin
python setup.py bdist_egg
cd dist
easy_install --prefix=$HOME/packages *.egg
cd ~/install_files

Pygments

Pygments is a plugin that will color the syntax of your code when you’re browsing the source. I chose this plugin because I do a lot of PHP programming, and Trac did not display PHP scripts at all without it.

easy_install --prefix=$HOME/packages Pygments

Once you’ve installed all the plugins, they now need to be configured in the trac.ini file. This file is located within your trac environment. If you’ve been following these steps, it should be located at ~/trac_sites/{trac_env}/conf/trac.ini. Use your editor of choice to modify this file and add the following to the end of it. But before you do that, let’s add an initial user. These must be the same usernames that you created when setting up the permissions for the trac environment.

htpasswd -c ~/trac_sites/trac.htpasswd {username}

Append this to the trac.ini file.

[account-manager]
password_format = htpasswd
password_file = /home/{your username}/trac_sites/trac.htpasswd

[components]
acct_mgr.* = enabled
trac.mimeview.api.plaintextrenderer = disabled
trac.mimeview.enscript.enscriptrenderer = enabled
trac.mimeview.php.phprenderer = disabled
trac.mimeview.silvercity.silvercityrenderer = disabled
trac.web.auth.loginmodule = disabled
tracpygments.* = enabled
webadmin.* = enabled

Finalize

Well, you’ve made it this far. Only a few more steps and you should be good to go!

Making Trac Web Accessible

These next few steps will allow you to access Trac from the web. Now, I’ve set it up so that Trac is a subdomain of my site. So it’s something like trac.your-domain.com. Within the root of my site I’ve created a trac directory for the subdomain to point to. Again, this is preference, and you can have it however you’d like. But the first step is to navigate to whatever directory that you’d like to view Trac from. Once there you’re going to create a new file index.cgi. Since it’s a .cgi file, you must make sure that it has execute permissions. Then open your favorite editor and drop this in.

#!/bin/bash
export HOME="/home/{username}"
export TRAC_ENV="$HOME/trac_sites/{your trac project id}"
export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/packages/lib/python2.5/site-packages"
export PATH="$HOME/packages/bin:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/packages/lib"
exec $HOME/packages/share/trac/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

Next we’re going to make a link to the common files that Trac uses to help speed up the display of the page. Things like the stylesheets, images, and javascript that help the site function. Again, make sure you’ve navigated to the directory where you are viewing Trac from.

mkdir chrome
ln -s $HOME/packages/share/trac/htdocs ./chrome/common

Finally, we need to modify the .htaccess file so that the site knows that index.cgi is the default page of the directory and we must make sure that mod_rewrite is on. So open .htaccess with your editor and drop this in.

Setup Rewrite Rule
Edit .htaccess located in the {domain name} directory
DirectoryIndex index.cgi
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.cgi/$1 [L]

And with that, you’re done! Ok, not quite… this final snippet is to replace and clean up the links within the Trac environment.  Since every link will pass through index.cgi the addressbar will always show it in the link. Like so: http://trac.your-domain.com/index.cgi/wiki. You can fix this like so, first navigate to this directory.

cd $HOME/packages/lib/python2.5/site-packages/trac/web

Then make a backup of the api.py file

cp api.py api.py.backup

Now open api.py in your editor and find this line.

base_path = property(fget=lambda self: self.environ.get('SCRIPT_NAME', ''), doc='The root path of the application')

and change it to

base_path = property(fget=lambda self: os.path.dirname(self.environ.get('SCRIPT_NAME', '')), doc='The root path of the application')

NOW, you’re done! Please feel free to leave a comment. Remember, results may vary, I tried to keep this as generic as possible, but sometimes things don’t always work the way you expect them.