RelatedSoftware/Trac

TracDarcs can be found at http://hub.darcs.net/lelit/trac-darcs and is the work of LeleGaifax.

Here are the steps I took to set it up so that eventually we could have a sourceforge-like environment for darcs. Note that this is a work in progress.

Notes:

  • WARNING: The new instructions have not been tested from A-Z; I would appreciate it if some people would confirm that it works and/or fix the bugs in this HOWTO
  • Matt Dorn has posted (2007) his own recipe to do this, here: http://www.mattdorn.com/content/trac-darcs-restructuredtext/ . If the instructions below do not work, then please consult Matt Dorn’s instructions, figure out what went wrong, and then improve these instructions!

Getting started

Debian

  1. Burn an ISO for Debian Sarge, network install
  2. FIXME: please update these instructions to work with Etch
  3. Install on the computer, all on one partition (unless you really want to think about this), using the webserver set of packages -turns out this is very easy to do. Only took 15 minutes.
  4. FIXME: somebody should come up with a reasonably sane and simple partitioning scheme, assuming a dedicated server
  5. Remove some uneeded stuff (thanks to #debian on irc.freenode.net) : apt-get remove portmap pidentd
  6. Install some comfort tools: apt-get install vim emacs joe
  7. Create some directories for the stuff you are about to install: cd; mkdir -p install/dtPlugins

Darcs

Debian Sarge does indeed have a darcs package, but the version they have is 1.0.2, and a lot of bugs have been fixed since then. We will compile darcs by hand. Alternatively you may consider using the version from www.backports.org, they also seem to have a current version.

  1. apt-get install ghc6 zlib1g-dev

  2. cd ~/install wget http://www.darcs.net/darcs-1.0.8.tar.gz tar xzf darcs-1.0.8.tar.gz cd darcs-1.0.8 ./configure make make install

  3. Create a place for darcs repositories:

    mkdir /var/darcs
addgroup darcs
chown root:darcs /var/darcs

Trac

  1. Use apt to get the dependencies we need to build trac manually:

    apt-get build-dep trac

  2. Install the latest version of setup tools - while setuptools is available as a Debian package, the one on Sarge does not seem to be recent enough

    cd ~/install
apt-get install python-dev
wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py
python ez_setup.py

  3. Get py-sqlite2, which unfortunately, is not available in Debian Sarge:

    apt-get install libsqlite3-0
wget http://backports.org/debian/pool/main/p/python-pysqlite2/python2.3-pysqlite2_2.2.2-0bpo1_i386.deb
dpkg -i python2.3-pysqlite2_2.2.2-0bpo1_i386.deb

  4. Don’t forget to replace intel by powerpc or whatever architecture is appropriate

  5. Install genshi, a recent dependency of Trac (it used to depend on ClearSilver):

    svn co http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/genshi/trunk genshi
cd genshi
python setup.py install

  6. Get the latest version of trac:

    cd ~/install
svn co http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/trunk trac
cd trac
python setup.py install

  7. Create a directory to hold all of the trac environments and their caches

    mkdir /var/trac
mkdir /var/trac-eggs
mkdir /var/trac-darcs-cache

Plugins

  1. install TracDarcs_:

    cd ~/install
darcs get http://darcs.arstecnica.it/trac-darcs
cd trac-darcs
python setup.py bdist_egg
cp dist/TracDarcs-0.4-py2.3.egg ~/install/dtPlugins

  2. install WebAdmin_:

    cd ~/install
svn co http://svn.edgewall.com/repos/trac/sandbox/webadmin/
cd webadmin
python setup.py install

  3. install AccountManager_:

    cd ~/install
svn co http://trac-hacks.swapoff.org/svn/accountmanagerplugin
cd accountmanagerplugin/0.9
python setup.py bdist_egg
cp dist/TracAccountManager-0.1.2-py2.3.egg ~/install/dtPlugins

A test environment

  1. Create a play repository (alternately, you could darcs get one of your own preexisting repos):

    mkdir -p /var/darcs/TestEnv/TestRepo
cd /var/darcs/TestEnv/TestRepo
darcs init
echo "blah blah blah" > foo
darcs add foo
darcs record -a -m "foo"

  2. Note how we allow for the eventual possibility that TestEnv has multiple repositories. Trac on Darcs does not yet support this, but maybe someday!

  3. Disable unpull and unrecord because trac on darcs doesn’t like it, and also because it’s probably a bad idea on “official” repositories

    echo unpull --disable >> _darcs/prefs/defaults
echo unrecord --disable >> _darcs/prefs/defaults
echo obliterate --disable >> _darcs/prefs/defaults

  4. Create a test environment:

    trac-admin /var/trac/TestEnv initenv

  5. Note that the previous command must be issued from within the directory you moved to with “cd” in step 1.

  6. When asked for a repository type, enter: darcs

  7. When asked for a repsoitory, enter /var/darcs/TestEnv/TestRepo

  8. Copy all plugins to the test environment:

    cp ~/install/dtPlugins/*.egg /var/trac/TestEnv/plugins

  9. Set up the darcs database stuff:

    trac-admin /var/trac/TestEnv upgrade

  10. Create the cachedir. The darcs plugin needs a place to cache versions of the files it creates while viewing files and changesets.

    mkdir /var/trac-darcs-cache/TestEnv

    Add the following lines to the end of the trac.ini file

    # /var/trac/TestEnv/conf/trac.ini

[darcs]
cachedir=/var/trac-darcs-cache/TestEnv

  11. Start the trac server to see if things worked out:

    tracd --port 8000 /var/trac/TestEnv

  12. Check it out by visiting yourserver:8000. The most gratifying moment should be when you click on ‘Browse’ and ‘Timeline’ and see your darcs changes.

  13. Hit Ctrl-c to kill the trac server.

Permissions

  1. addgroup trac adduser www-data trac chown -R root:trac /var/trac /var/trac-eggs /var/trac-darcs-cache chmod -R g+w /var/trac /var/trac-eggs /var/trac-darcs-cache

Apache

  1. Install and configure Apache2

    apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-python
vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

  2. Uncomment the following lines:

    UserDir public_html
UserDir disabled root

<Directory /home/*/public_html>
AllowOverride
FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Options
Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
IncludesNoExec
</Directory>

  • this enables homepages in ~projname

  • Insert the following at the end of the file :

    # note, this may have been mangled by a wiki syntax
# switchover... be careful
<Location /projects>
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption
TracEnvParentDir /var/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /projects 
SetEnv PYTHON_EGG_CACHE /var/trac-eggs
</Location>

<Directory /var/darcs>
AllowOverride
FileInfo
AuthConfig Limit Options
Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
IncludesNoExec
</Directory>

Alias /darcs/ "/var/darcs/"

  • The Options Indexes block is so that people don’t get a confusing (but harmless) 403 Forbidden when they click on a darcs repository link

  • Note: the /darcs alias is so that people can do stuff like darcs get http://yourserver/darcs/TestEnv/TestRepo)

  • You may need to also enable the userdir module with:

    ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/userdir.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.load

  • create an htpasswd file so that people can login

    touch /var/trac/.htaccess

  • chase the robots away: (otherwise, you’ll have bots running darcs on your machine, which will slow things down a great deal). Put the following in /var/www/robots.txt:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /projects/

  • restart apache

    /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Bask in your accomplishments so far

Congatulations, at this point you have Trac running on top of darcs! Your Test Environment isn’t complete; there aren’t any users, and the WebAdmin and Account-Manager plugins need to be enabled by further editing the trac.ini. More info about this configuration can be found on their respective home pages. If all you need is to Trac a single project then go set that up and you are done!

We aren’t going to do that here since with the Test Environment we were just trying to prove Trac on Darcs works. We are now going to set up a multi-project environment and have some scripts (currently beta) designed to do that setup for you, so read onwards.

Jailkit

Now that you’ve got trac, darcs, and your webserver set up, the next step is to create a jail for the darcs users on your machine. Whether or not this is actually useful is debatable, but it does make me marginally more comfortable with the idea of giving shell access to your users.

Notes:

  • This isn’t absolutely mandatory, but note that the adminDT scripts below assume that you have things set up with jailkit.

  • An alternative would be to use a restrained shell, as the RepoSSH page suggests, but then people can’t do stuff like set up their public_html spaces).

  • Trac itself would not be running in the jail; just the users when they ssh into your machine

  • Obtain Jailkit :
    ``

apt-get install bzip2 cd ~/install wget http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-1.3.tar.bz2 tar xjvf jailkit-1.3.tar.bz2 cd jailkit-1.3 ./configure make make install - Setup your jail directory (basically from their instructions, except we use /var/jail): mkdir /var/jail chown root:root /var/jail mkdir /var/jail/tmp chmod a+rwx /var/jail/tmp jk_init -v /var/jail basicshell jk_init -v /var/jail editors jk_init -v /var/jail extendedshell jk_init -v /var/jail scp jk_cp /var/jail /usr/local/bin/darcs mkdir /var/jail/var mv /var/darcs /var/jail/var chown -R root:darcs /var/jail/var/darcs ln -s /var/jail/var/darcs /var/darcs - Edit your/etc/apache2/apache.confand make the following modification: # replace this line <Directory /home//public_html> # with… <Directory /var/jail/home//public_html> - Restart apache again: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart ``

Creating a new project

Creating a project consists of setting up a darcs repository, a trac environment, and one Unix user for the project. This user will have no password, as is expected to log in by ssh key (the idea being that all developers give their public keys to the user). To automate the whole process, you can use the following shell scripts:

darcs get http://trac.loria.fr/darcs/admindt/adminDT

These scripts also provide a little bit of extra fanciness, such as automated nightly darcs dist. You can find out more on the project page

Missing pieces

  • apache configuration stuff for the new project
  • virtual host stuff
  • need to think about what jailed users really need to be able to do
  • integrate –disable into darcs prefs for each user
  • should we jail apache as well?
  • tips for maintaining/securing your installation

Notes

  • I don’t claim to know what I’m doing with the Apache stuff… or in fact, any of this. It’s just what worked for me.