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Subversion & Trac (SDI 07 Part III)

In this episde of the series on creating a minimal software development infrastructure, we are dealing with the centerpiece of the solution: setting up Subversion as the version control system and Trac to provide a unified and integrated system for bug/issue tracking, collaborative document editing (wiki) and source control repository browsing as well as a platform for further integration and extension. All the necessary packages are already installed on the server as part of the previous episode.

Assuming that our infrastructure server has a payload partition mounted under /data and our fictitious project is called "sdi07", we are setting up the disk space for our project as follows:
mkdir /data/
mkdir /data/sdi07/svn
mkdir /data/sdi07/trac
To properly initialize the databases for svn and trac, we need to run the following commands,
svnadmin create /data/sdi07/svn
trac-admin /data/sdi07/trac initenv
and answer a few basic questions for trac-admin. In particular we need to specify the name of the project as it will appear on the Trac main page and the path to the subversion repository ( /data/sdi07/svn as specified above). Since we are using subversion as the version-control system and sqlite as the back-end storage for trac, we stay with the default choices for all the remaining questions.

After initialization, any configuration choices can be changed by editing /data/sdi07/trac/conf/trac.ini or by running trac-admin/data/sdi07/trac/ with one of the supported commands.

Both Subversion and Trac have their own specific server implementations, but both also support access through an Apache web server. We choose to go the Apache way to unify front-end setup and user account management.

Since all operations originated from the Apache front-end are executed under the permissions of the low-privilege apache/apache Unix user, we sign over the entire project space to that user first:
chown -R apache:apache /data/sdi07
Since we have installed subversion with the apache2 use flag, the necessary modules and config files to support subversion access through Apache have been installed. In order to map subversion access under the URL http://localhost/sdi07/svn/, we add/modify the following to /etc/apache2/modules.d/47_mod_dav_svn.conf:
<Location /sdi07/svn>
DAV svn
SVNPath /data/sdi07/svn
</Location>
The simplest way to configure Trac within the Apache configuration is by using mod python. To map the Trac instance we just configured under the URL http://localhost/sdi07/trac/, add the following section into the module specific conditional configuration in the file /etc/apache2/modules.d/16_mod_python.conf:
<Location /sdi07/trac>
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnv /data/sdi07/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /sdi07/trac
</Location>
Both Subversion and Trac require a user identity - at least for any write operations. If the http accesses are authenticated, the user identify will be passed by Apache to the corresponding Subversion or Trac backends.

Among the many options for user authentication with Apache, the simplest to set up is to use basic authentication with a local htpasswd file. In order to require all access to our entire project webspace under http://localhost/sdi07/, we add the following section to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
<Location /sdi07>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "SDI07"
AuthUserFile /data/sdi07/htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Loction>
In order to create access for a new user, execute the following command:
htpasswd2 /data/sdi07/htpasswd <username>
After the empty file has been created apache:apache file ownership permissions. While this approach to user account management is very simple, it is admittedly not very flexible. We will discuss some alternative approaches to user account management later on.

In order to finalize the configuration and start up the Apache web front-end, we need to add activate the required optional Apache modules in /etc/conf.d/apache2:
APACHE2_OPTS="$APACHE2_OPTS -D PYTHON -D SVN -D DAV -D DAV_FS"

and then finally try to start the newly configured front-end with
/etc/init.d/apache2 configtest
/etc/init.d/apache2 start
while monitoring /var/log/messages and /var/log/apache2/error_log for
any errors. Once any potential configuration issues are fixed and Apache is starting up properly, we can add it to the default runtime configuration with
rc-update add apache2 default
After Apache is running properly, we should see a default wiki homepage for our project at http://localhost/sdi07/trac and we should be able to create the basic recommended source-tree layout for a new Subversion project as follows:
svn checkout http://localhost/sdi07/svn my_workspace
cd my_workspace
svn mkdir trunk
svn mkdir branches
svn mkdir tags
svn commit -m "create initial directory structure"
Typical causes for errors at this stage, might be file ownership - i.e. not all necessary files have access permissions for the apache user under which the Apache web-server is running or some typo in any of the configuration files.

Since this setup is based on the state of the Gentoo world of 2007 (from Sabayon Linux 3.3b live min-CD), some details certainly have changed with newer version and need to be adjusted. The versions of the key packages used here in particular are as follows:
dev-util/subversion-1.4.3-r1
dev-python/mod_python-3.3.1
net-www/apache-2.2.4-r1
www-apps/trac-0.10.4
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