Setting up Subversion and Trac on Ubuntu

In the great tradition of professionals ignoring their own problems – Mechanics cars that won’t start, Plumbers with leaking pipes, Electricians with bad wiring, Carpenters with sticking doors, and so on – I have finally got around to installing some tools for my own use.

First up was Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/). After trying to remember all of my client’s defects and enhancement requests, I decided that it was time to manage these properly. Checking the requirements for Trac showed that it needed a Subversion with Python bindings and my current Windows Subversion (using Slik Subversion) did not include this. As I preferred to run Trac from my Development machine (Ubuntu 12.04) anyway, the easiest solution was to move the Subversion repository there as well.

Setting up Subversion on the Development machine was easy enough. I was already using svnadmin to dump the repository as a backup, so it was just a matter of committing all of the changes, taking a backup and stopping the Windows svn service. Subversion was then installed on the Development machine (http://odyniec.net/articles/ubuntu-subversion-server/) and the repository restored. The last step was to change the local DNS settings so that ‘svn.localdomain’ now referred to the Development machine. Apart from re-prompting for credentials none of my environments even noticed that the repository had moved. So far, so good.

Trac was a little more work to set up. One of the problems with the Internet is that there are lots of out of date pages that are still hanging around even though the versions that they apply to are long gone (I am sure that this page will join that list soon enough). So I was tying to install Trac 0.12 on Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) and the instructions from the Trac Project were extensive but a few things did not work (http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/0.12/TracInstall), which lead to more problems and so on. Eventually I followed the instructions from Robert Basic (http://robertbasic.com/blog/trac-on-ubuntu) and soon had a sample project active. Then it was just a matter of defining all of my projects and tasks. Finally this tip (http://serverfault.com/questions/6147/how-do-i-backup-my-trac-instalations) was used as the basis for a backup script.

Now to install Hudson.

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