Trac is written in the Python programming language and needs a database, SQLite, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. For HTML rendering, Trac uses the Genshi templating system.
Since version 0.12, Trac can also be localized, and there's probably a translation available for your language. If you want to be able to use the Trac interface in other languages, then make sure you have installed the optional package Babel. Pay attention to the extra steps for localization support in the Installing Trac section below. Lacking Babel, you will only get the default english version, as usual.
If you're interested in contributing new translations for other languages or enhance the existing translations, then please have a look at TracL10N.
What follows are generic instructions for installing and setting up Trac and its requirements. While you may find instructions for installing Trac on specific systems at TracInstallPlatforms on the main Trac site, please be sure to first read through these general instructions to get a good understanding of the tasks involved.
To install Trac, the following software packages must be installed:
You also need a database system and the corresponding python bindings. The database can be either SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
As you must be using Python 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7, you already have the SQLite database bindings bundled with the standard distribution of Python (the sqlite3 module).
However, if you'd like, you can download the latest and greatest version of Pysqlite from
google code, where you'll find the Windows
installers or the tar.gz archive for building from source:
$ tar xvfz <version>.tar.gz $ cd <version> $ python setup.py build_static install
This will download the latest SQLite code and build the bindings.
SQLite 2.x is no longer supported.
A known bug PySqlite versions 2.5.2-4 prohibits upgrade of trac databases from 0.11.x to 0.12. Please use versions 2.5.5 and newer or 2.5.1 and older. See #9434 for more detail.
See additional information in PySqlite.
You need to install the database and its Python bindings:
See DatabaseBackend for details.
Trac can now work quite well with MySQL, provided you follow the guidelines.
It is very important to read carefully the MySqlDb page before creating the database.
There are pre-compiled SWIG bindings available for various platforms. (Good luck finding precompiled SWIG bindings for any Windows package at that listing. TracSubversion points you to Algazam, which works for me under Python 2.6.)
Note that Trac doesn't use PySVN, neither does it work yet with the newer ctype-style bindings.
Please note: if using Subversion, Trac must be installed on the same machine. Remote repositories are currently not supported.
Support for other version control systems is provided via third-parties. See PluginList and VersionControlSystem.
A web server is optional because Trac is shipped with a server included, see the Running the Standalone Server section below.
Alternatively you configure Trac to run in any of the following environments.
Attention: The various available versions of these dependencies are not necessarily interchangable, so please pay attention to the version numbers above. If you are having trouble getting Trac to work please double-check all the dependencies before asking for help on the MailingList or IrcChannel.
Please refer to the documentation of these packages to find out how they are best installed. In addition, most of the platform-specific instructions also describe the installation of the dependencies. Keep in mind however that the information there probably concern older versions of Trac than the one you're installing (there are even some pages that are still talking about Trac 0.8!).
easy_installOne way to install Trac is using setuptools. With setuptools you can install Trac from the subversion repository;
A few examples:
easy_install Trac==1.0(NOT YET ENABLED)
easy_install Trac==devNote that in this case you won't have the possibility to run a localized version of Trac; either use a released version or install from source
pip'pip' is an easy_install replacement that is very useful to quickly install python packages. To get a trac installation up and running in less than 5 minutes:
Assuming you want to have your entire pip installation in /opt/user/trac
pip -E /opt/user/trac install trac psycopg2
or
pip -E /opt/user/trac install trac mysql-python
Make sure your OS specific headers are available for pip to automatically build PostgreSQL (libpq-dev) or MySQL (libmysqlclient-dev) bindings.
pip will automatically resolve all dependencies (like Genshi, pygments, etc.) and download the latest packages on pypi.python.org and create a self contained installation in /opt/user/trac.
All commands (tracd, trac-admin) are available in /opt/user/trac/bin. This can also be leveraged for mod_python (using PythonHandler directive) and mod_wsgi (using WSGIDaemonProcess directive)
Additionally, you can install several trac plugins (listed here) through pip.
Of course, using the python-typical setup at the top of the source directory also works.
You can obtain the source for a .tar.gz or .zip file corresponding to a release (e.g. Trac-1.0.tar.gz), or you can get the source directly from the repository (see Trac:SubversionRepository for details).
$ python ./setup.py install
You'll need root permissions or equivalent for this step.
This will byte-compile the python source code and install it as an .egg file or folder in the site-packages directory
of your Python installation. The .egg will also contain all other resources needed by standard Trac, such as htdocs and templates.
The script will also install the trac-admin command-line tool, used to create and maintain project environments, as well as the tracd standalone server.
If you install from source and want to make Trac available in other languages, make sure Babel is installed. Only then, perform the install (or simply redo the install once again afterwards if you realize Babel was not yet installed):
$ python ./setup.py install
Alternatively, you can do a bdist_egg and copy the .egg from dist/ to the place of your choice, or you can create a Windows installer (bdist_wininst).
To install Trac to a custom location, or find out about other advanced installation options, run:
easy_install --help
Also see Installing Python Modules for detailed information.
Specifically, you might be interested in:
easy_install --prefix=/path/to/installdir
or, if installing Trac to a Mac OS X system:
easy_install --prefix=/usr/local --install-dir=/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages
Note: If installing on Mac OS X 10.6 running easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/trunk will install into /usr/local and /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages by default
The above will place your tracd and trac-admin commands into /usr/local/bin and will install the Trac libraries and dependencies into /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages, which is Apple's preferred location for third-party Python application installations.
A Trac environment is the backend storage where Trac stores information like wiki pages, tickets, reports, settings, etc. An environment is basically a directory that contains a human-readable configuration file, and various other files and directories.
A new environment is created using trac-admin:
$ trac-admin /path/to/myproject initenv
trac-admin will prompt you for the information it needs to create the environment, such as the name of the project and the database connection string. If you're not sure what to specify for one of these options, just press <Enter> to use the default value.
Using the default database connection string in particular will always work as long as you have SQLite installed. For the other [DatabaseBackend database backends] you should plan ahead and already have a database ready to use at this point.
Since 0.12, Trac doesn't ask for a source code repository anymore when creating an environment. Repositories can be added afterward, or the version control support can be disabled completely if you don't need it.
Also note that the values you specify here can be changed later by directly editing the conf/trac.ini configuration file.
Finally, make sure the user account under which the web front-end runs will have write permissions to the environment directory and all the files inside. This will be the case if you run trac-admin ... initenv as this user. If not, you should set the correct user afterwards. For example on Linux, with the web server running as user apache and group apache, enter:
# chown -R apache.apache /path/to/myproject
Warning: Please only use ASCII-characters for account name and project path, unicode characters are not supported there.
After having created a Trac environment, you can easily try the web interface by running the standalone server tracd:
$ tracd --port 8000 /path/to/myproject
Then, fire up a browser and visit http://localhost:8000/. You should get a simple listing of all environments that tracd knows about. Follow the link to the environment you just created, and you should see Trac in action. If you only plan on managing a single project with Trac you can have the standalone server skip the environment list by starting it like this:
$ tracd -s --port 8000 /path/to/myproject
Trac provides various options for connecting to a "real" web server:
Trac also supports AJP which may be your choice if you want to connect to IIS. Other deployment scenarios are possible: nginx, uwsgi, Isapi-wsgi etc.
In order for Trac to function properly with FastCGI you need to have a trac.fcgi file and for mod_wsgi a trac.wsgi file. These are Python scripts which load the appropriate Python code. They can be generated using the deploy option of trac-admin.
There is, however, a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The trac-admin command requires an existing environment to function, but complains if the deploy directory already exists. This is a problem, because environments are often stored in a subdirectory of the deploy. The solution is to do something like this:
mkdir -p /usr/share/trac/projects/my-project trac-admin /usr/share/trac/projects/my-project initenv trac-admin /usr/share/trac/projects/my-project deploy /tmp/deploy mv /tmp/deploy/* /usr/share/trac
Out of the box, Trac will pass static resources such as style sheets or images through itself. For anything but a tracd only based deployment, this is far from optimal as the web server could be set up to directly serve those static resources (for CGI setup, this is highly undesirable and will cause abysmal performance).
Web servers such as Apache allow you to create “Aliases” to resources, giving them a virtual URL that doesn't necessarily reflect the layout of the servers file system. We also can map requests for static resources directly to the directory on the file system, avoiding processing these requests by Trac itself.
There are two primary URL paths for static resources - /chrome/common and /chrome/site. Plugins can add their own resources, usually accessible by /chrome/<plugin> path, so its important to override only known paths and not try to make universal /chrome alias for everything.
Note that in order to get those static resources on the filesystem, you need first to extract the relevant resources from Trac using the trac-admin <environment> deploy command:
deploy <directory>
Extract static resources from Trac and all plugins
The target <directory> will then contain an htdocs directory with:
site/ - a copy of the environment's directory htdocs/
common/ - the static resources of Trac itself
<plugins>/ - one directory for each resource directory managed by the plugins enabled for this environment
ScriptAliasAssuming the deployment has been done this way:
$ trac-admin /var/trac/env deploy /path/to/trac/htdocs/common
Add the following snippet to Apache configuration before the ScriptAlias or WSGIScriptAlias (which map all the other requests to the Trac application), changing paths to match your deployment:
Alias /trac/chrome/common /path/to/trac/htdocs/common Alias /trac/chrome/site /path/to/trac/htdocs/site <Directory "/path/to/www/trac/htdocs"> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>
If using mod_python, you might want to add this too (otherwise, the alias will be ignored):
<Location "/trac/chrome/common/"> SetHandler None </Location>
Note that we mapped /trac part of the URL to the trac.*cgi script, and the path /trac/chrome/common is the path you have to append to that location to intercept requests to the static resources.
Similarly, if you have static resources in a project's htdocs directory (which is referenced by /trac/chrome/site URL in themes), you can configure Apache to serve those resources (again, put this before the ScriptAlias or WSGIScriptAlias for the .*cgi scripts, and adjust names and locations to match your installation):
Alias /trac/chrome/site /path/to/projectenv/htdocs <Directory "/path/to/projectenv/htdocs"> Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory>
Alternatively to aliasing /trac/chrome/common, you can tell Trac to generate direct links for those static resources (and only those), using the [trac] htdocs_location configuration setting:
[trac] htdocs_location = http://static.example.org/trac-common/
Note that this makes it easy to have a dedicated domain serve those static resources (preferentially cookie-less).
Of course, you still need to make the Trac htdocs/common directory available through the web server at the specified URL, for example by copying (or linking) the directory into the document root of the web server:
$ ln -s /path/to/trac/htdocs/common /var/www/static.example.org/trac-common
Some Python plugins need to be extracted to a cache directory. By default the cache resides in the home directory of the current user. When running Trac on a Web Server as a dedicated user (which is highly recommended) who has no home directory, this might prevent the plugins from starting. To override the cache location you can set the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE environment variable. Refer to your server documentation for detailed instructions on how to set environment variables.
Trac uses HTTP authentication. You'll need to configure your webserver to request authentication when the .../login URL is hit (the virtual path of the "login" button). Trac will automatically pick the REMOTE_USER variable up after you provide your credentials. Therefore, all user management goes through your web server configuration. Please consult the documentation of your web server for more info.
The process of adding, removing, and configuring user accounts for authentication depends on the specific way you run Trac.
Please refer to one of the following sections:
tracd.
mod_wsgi of course, but the same instructions applies also for mod_python, mod_fcgi or mod_fastcgi.
Grant admin rights to user admin:
$ trac-admin /path/to/myproject permission add admin TRAC_ADMIN
This user will have an "Admin" entry menu that will allow you to admin your trac project.
You can configure SVN to automatically add a reference to the changeset into the ticket comments, whenever changes are committed to the repository. The description of the commit needs to contain one of the following formulas:
Refs #123 - to reference this changeset in #123 ticket
Fixes #123 - to reference this changeset and close #123 ticket with the default status fixed
This functionality requires a post-commit hook to be installed as described in TracRepositoryAdmin, and enabling the optional commit updater components by adding the following line to the [components] section of your trac.ini, or enabling the components in the "Plugins" admin panel.
tracopt.ticket.commit_updater.* = enabled
For more information, see the documentation of the CommitTicketUpdater component in the "Plugins" admin panel.
Once you have your Trac site up and running, you should be able to create tickets, view the timeline, browse your version control repository if configured, etc.
Keep in mind that anonymous (not logged in) users can by default access only a few of the features, in particular they will have a read-only access to the resources. You will need to configure authentication and grant additional permissions to authenticated users to see the full set of features.
Enjoy!
See also: TracInstallPlatforms, TracGuide, TracUpgrade, TracPermissions