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I have a development server set up so that I can back up my code and colloborate with others on code, similar to Google Code, but self hosted. It is set up using apache as the webserver, SVN for the code repository, and Trac for the wiki, source management frontend. Trac is extremely expandable and customizable and is used by a number of projects such as Pidgin. I will highlight my trac modifications in my next post.

In this post I will highlight installing and setting up all of the needed components on a Debian system.

Install Programs

sudo apt-get install apache2 subversion trac python-setuptools libapache2-mod-python enscript

SVN Configuration

First we will need to create a repository for a project. Let’s say that we want the project and repository to be called project1. Run these following commands to create the repository with the proper permissions

cd /var
sudo mkdir svn
sudo svnadmin create /var/svn/project1
sudo chmod -R www-data svn

Trac Configuration

Now we will need to create the corresponding trac project by entering the following commands. Keep in mind the location of the subversion repository

cd /var/lib
sudo mkdir trac
sudo trac-admin project1 initenv
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data project1

You will then want to add ad administrative user to the trac project. We will create and add a user root to our project1 with the following

sudo trac-admin project1 permission add root TRAC_ADMIN

Now we will need to tie a password to the user that Trac can use. We will set the password for the root user to passwd123 with the following command.

sudo htpasswd -cb /etc/apache2/passwords root passwd123

Apache Configuration

Now we need to tell Apache about the trac project so that it can serve the pages and handle authentication. You can do this by adding the following lines to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

        <Location /projects>
             SetHandler mod_python
             PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
             PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
             PythonOption TracUriRoot /projects
             PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/lib/trac
        </Location>

       <Location "/projects/[^/]+/login">
             AuthType       Basic       
             AuthName       "Dummy Project trac"
             AuthUserFile   /var/etc/passwords      
             Require        valid-user
        </Location>

Now we will just need to restart apache with the following command

sudo service apache2 restart

Now you should have a basic development server ready to go. I will show you soon how to really get the most out of your trac setup.

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