humbled by trac

My impression is that trac is designed to display a single SVN repository, though there is ongoing work to convince trac to act as a frontend to more than one. Do you really need that?

Some alternate options might be: (a) put all your separate SVN repositories into a single SVN repo, separated by top-level name, or (b) run a separate trac instance for each SVN repo.

I note that the dreamhost instructions you followed seem to imply using fastcgi instead of apache’s mod_python. My main experience installing trac is to use mod_python, so i don’t have much to suggest here at the moment.

I feel your pain — I’ve been through a few painful trac installs. The way I’ve gotten it to work for multiple repos is to have an index page that lists the current trac projects. Each repo is mapped to an individual trac project. As far as I know there is no built in way to share data (tickets, etc) between multiple trac projects if that is what your looking for, but it wouldn’t be too hard to hack something together for something as simple as showing a display of aggregated tickets. One pretty stupid but simple way that comes to mind would be to use yahoo pipes to aggregate rss feeds of separate trac tickets. Below is a snippet of my apache config that genetates the trac multi-repo index page, if that’s helpful.

SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /var/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /projects
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Projects, Uncommon"
AuthUserFile /mnt/c/trac/access.user
AuthGroupFile /mnt/c/trac/access.group
Require group mishare ast

good luck,

josh (fyi I work with tarikh)

Thanks Josh. (and yeah, I recognized the URL. pleased to meet you.)

I added some HTML to your comment (comment preview is something dkg asks for fairly often, or did until he gave up asking for it).

What I really want is a debian box someplace. The puzzle that I’ve got right now is that our live site is a scary mishmash of code, URL redirects, PEAR packages, Perl scripts and Apache Mods and I’m afraid to move it (I’ve tried. It didn’t go so well) and it lives on a RHEL server. We’ve got some space on a Dreamhost server as well, where our repository is hosted.

Dreamhost is free (we’re a non-profit), and pretty reliable. The RHEL server feels fragile, generally. It was running PHP4 until a month ago when I held my breath upgraded to 5. Sure enough, I’m still lying by the side of the pool sputtering and hyperventilating. (“Uh, yeah. that is what i’m saying, that this whole section of the site has been loading big blank white pages for a bit more than a month.”) I could just read the error logs, but the site generates a lot of errors in its natural state and I’m not prepared to fix them all. Or rather, I am, but I want a staging site and version control and now that I have those things I’m finding that I also desire a graphical interface to the version control system and … it starts to feel like a feedback loop. The space under my desk starts looking awfully cozy, like maybe I should just curl up there for a while.

So, I can try to install Subversion and Trac on our RHEL server, but I don’t really want to get into learning RedHat for purposes of getting our site stable enough to move it off of RedHat.

I can try to install Trac on the Dreamhost server that is already running Subversion (and someone else maintains it: score 5 pts for that option) and hosting our repositories (there are really only two). I don’t have root access, however, which does limit the usefulness my comprehensive knowledge of apt and apache configuration. (knock a few pts back off that score) Feh.

Or I could try to set up my own Debian box someplace and do all this, but that we’d have to pay for, which seems kind of silly if all I want is Trac and I’ve been told that it can be done, Trac on Dreamhost.

I’m not giving up just yet.