Lately I’ve been busy working on my side project. Its nothing commercial, its a hobby project for fun and learning purposes. Anyway, due to procrastination, I have been using Excel as means to track my bugs/to-dos. Using Excel as a bug/to-dos tracking tool was alright at first, but as your list of bugs and to-dos grows, its getting tedious and inefficient. So I decided to use a proper bug tracking tool to make things easier to manage and I chose Trac to be my bug tracking tools.

Installing Trac is not hard, but can be very daunting due to their un-organized documentation. It will confuse you in every way you can possibly imagine. To install Trac, you are required to install a couple of its dependencies, and there are multiple ways of doing it. The documentation fails to logically group and place these several ways of installing Trac and its dependencies, which confuses me a lot when I tried to install Trac on my machine. In this post I will show how I installed Trac on my system.

Why I chose Trac

• It can use SQLite as its database.
• It comes with a Wikipedia component.
• It provides SVN integration.
• It comes with a standalone web server, which means you do not have to install a web server.

Trac Installation

• Download and Install Python version 2.4 or more. I was using Python 2.5.4.
• Download and Install SetupTools for Python 2.5.
• Run windows Command Prompt and go to the scripts folder in your python install directory [python install dir]/Scripts. e.g. (c:\Python2.5\Scripts).
• Run the following Command Line to install Trac: easy_install Trac
• Run the following Command Line to install SVN python bindings (Optional, but required to enable SVN integration): easy_install -Z http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/1.4.5-win32/apache-2.0/svn-python-1.5.2.win32-py2.5.exe

Getting Trac Up and Running

• Create a new folder where you want to place your Trac environment for your project. e.g. c:\projects\trac\my-project.
• Create your SVN repository (Only if you don’t have pre-existing repository).
• Run windows Command Prompt and go to the scripts folder in your python install directory [python install dir]/Scripts. e.g. (c:\Python2.5\Scripts).
• Run the following Command Line to initialize your project’s Trac environment: trac-admin.exe [Trac Environment Folder You Created in Step 1] initenv.
  e.g. trac-admin.exe c:\project\trac\my-project initenv.
• Follow the instructions.
• Run the following Command Line to fire up the standalone web server: tracd -p [port number] [Trac Environment Path].
  e.g. tracd –p 8000 c:/projects/trac/my-project.
• Open up your web browser and type http://localhost:8000

Enabling Authentication in Trac

• Run windows Command Prompt and go to the scripts folder in your python install directory [python install dir]/Scripts. e.g. (c:\Python2.5\Scripts).
• Download and save the following python script to the directory in step 1. You need to rename the file extension to .py. trac-digest.py
• Run the following command line to use the python script to create a new user: trac-digest.py –u [username] –p [password] >> [password file path].
  e.g. trac-digest.py –u rwendi –p foo >> c:\trac\myproject\password.txt.
• Run the following command line to give your user full permission: trac-admin [trac environment path] permission add [username] TRAC_ADMIN.
  e.g. trac-admin c:\project\trac\my-project permission add rwendi TRAC_ADMIN.
• Lastly you need to run the standalone web server on authentication mode by running the following command line: tracd –p [port number] --auth=[projectname],[password file path],trac [Trac Environment Path].
  e.g. tracd –p 8000 --auth=my-project,c:\trac\myproject\password.txt,trac c:\project\trac\my-project

Resources:

• Trac Website [link]
• Python Website [link]
• SVN Website [link]

RWendi