Software installation

All required packages are installed by the following command:

apt-get install lighttpd trac subversion apache2-utils

We install lighttpd together with trac, as otherwise the trac package will pull in an installation of apache2, which is a bit more heavyweight than what I wanted.

Setting up the directory tree

Let’s set up a directory tree for trac:

for p in env svn auth; do mkdir -p /srv/trac/$p/demo; done

One directory for the trac environment data, another for the subversion repository and the third for authentication data. Putting all environments into a single directory (/srv/trac/env) would allow to run a single trac server for all environments using the TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR configuration variable.

Creating a trac environment

The trac environment is created using

trac-admin /srv/trac/env/demo initenv

The command will ask interactively for the following settings:

• Project name: Enter a name as you like (“Demo”). Note that you can change this later.
• Database connection string: You can accept the default sqlite database.
• Repository type: I used the default “svn” selection.
• Path to repository: /srv/trac/svn/demo

From now on, we can access the (empty) trac instance by running tracd --port 8000 /srv/trac/env/demo and accessing the trac-integrated web server at port 8000 of the server. Hit Ctrl-C to kill the tracd after you don’t need it any longer.

Creating an initial user

By default, trac creates no users. Only anonymous access is allowed, which by default is read-only. Therefore, we have to create a user to add content. Let’s use digest authentication:

htdigest -c /srv/trac/auth/demo/users "trac demo realm" admin
trac-admin /srv/trac/env/demo permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN

You can now start tracd with authentication:

tracd --port 8000 \
    --auth=demo,/srv/trac/auth/demo/users,"trac demo realm" \
    /srv/trac/env/demo

Configure lighttpd

To use lighttpd to serve the trac environment, we first need to fix the permissions:

chown -R www-data /srv/trac/env
chmod +x /usr/share/pyshared/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py

I think, the second command should not be required and filed Debian bug #510441 because of this.

Next, we need a configuration file. It delegates the trac path to a FastCGI handler and contains the location of the authentication data. Copy the configuration file to /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/ and enable the configuration:

lighty-enable-mod auth trac-demo
/etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

The trac instance should be available at http://HOSTNAME/trac. Have fun!

Automatic setup

For my own tests I wrote a script which does most of this automatically. Use at your own risk!

BTW: All of this was tested against Debian lenny (not released at time of writing).