Tracd

Tracd is a lightweight standalone Trac web server. In most cases it's easier to setup and runs faster than the CGI script.

Pros

• Fewer dependencies: You don't need to install apache or any other web-server.
• Fast: Should be almost as fast as the mod_python version (and much faster than the CGI).
• Automatic reloading: For development, Tracd can be used in auto_reload mode, which will automatically restart the server whenever you make a change to the code (in Trac itself or in a plugin).

Cons

• Fewer features: Tracd implements a very simple web-server and is not as configurable or as scalable as Apache HTTPD.
• No native HTTPS support: ​sslwrap can be used instead, or ​stunnel -- a tutorial on how to use stunnel with tracd or Apache with mod_proxy.

Usage examples

A single project on port 8080. (​http://localhost:8080/)

 $ tracd -p 8080 /path/to/project

Stricly speaking this will make your Trac accessible to everybody from your network rather than localhost only. To truly limit it use --hostname option.

 $ tracd --hostname=localhost -p 8080 /path/to/project

With more than one project. (​http://localhost:8080/project1/ and ​http://localhost:8080/project2/)

 $ tracd -p 8080 /path/to/project1 /path/to/project2

You can't have the last portion of the path identical between the projects since Trac uses that name to keep the URLs of the different projects unique. So if you use /project1/path/to and /project2/path/to, you will only see the second project.

An alternative way to serve multiple projects is to specify a parent directory in which each subdirectory is a Trac project, using the -e option. The example above could be rewritten:

 $ tracd -p 8080 -e /path/to

To exit the server on Windows, be sure to use CTRL-BREAK -- using CTRL-C will leave a Python process running in the background.

Using Authentication

Tracd provides support for both Basic and Digest authentication. The default is to use Digest; to use Basic authentication, replace --auth with --basic-auth in the examples below. (You must still specify a dialogic "realm", which can be an empty string by trailing the BASICAUTH with a comma.)

Support for Basic authentication was added in version 0.9.

The general format for using authentication is:

 $ tracd -p port --auth=base_project_dir,password_file_path,realm project_path

where:

• base_project_dir is the base directory of the project; note: this doesn't refer to the project name, and it is case-sensitive even for windows environments
• password_file_path path of the password file
• realm realm
• project_path path of the project

Example:

 $ tracd -p 8080 \
   --auth=project1,/path/to/users.htdigest,mycompany.com /path/to/project1

Of course, the digest file can be be shared so that it is used for more than one project:

 $ tracd -p 8080 \
   --auth=project1,/path/to/users.htdigest,mycompany.com \
   --auth=project2,/path/to/users.htdigest,mycompany.com \
   /path/to/project1 /path/to/project2

Another way to share the digest file is to specify "*" for the project name:

 $ tracd -p 8080 \
   --auth=*,/path/to/users.htdigest,mycompany.com \
   /path/to/project1 /path/to/project2

How to set up an htdigest password file

If you have Apache available, you can use the htdigest command to generate the password file. Type 'htdigest' to get some usage instructions, or read ​this page from the Apache manual to get precise instructions. You'll be prompted for a password to enter for each user that you create. For the name of the password file, you can use whatever you like, but if you use something like users.htdigest it will remind you what the file contains. As a suggestion, put it in your <projectname>/conf folder along with the trac.ini file.

Note that you can start tracd without the --auth argument, but if you click on the Login link you will get an error.

Generating Passwords Without Apache

If you don't have Apache available, you can use this simple Python script to generate your passwords:

from optparse import OptionParser
import md5

# build the options
usage = "usage: %prog [options]"
parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
parser.add_option("-u", "--username",action="store", dest="username", type = "string",
                  help="the username for whom to generate a password")
parser.add_option("-p", "--password",action="store", dest="password", type = "string",
                  help="the password to use")
(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

# check options
if (options.username is None) or (options.password is None):
   parser.error("You must supply both the username and password")
   
# Generate the string to enter into the htdigest file
realm = 'trac'
kd = lambda x: md5.md5(':'.join(x)).hexdigest()
print ':'.join((options.username, realm, kd([options.username, realm, options.password])))

Note: If you use the above script you must use the --auth option to tracd, not --basic-auth, and you must set the realm in the --auth value to 'trac' (without the quotes). Example usage (assuming you saved the script as trac-digest.py):

python trac-digest.py -u username -p password >> c:\digest.txt
tracd --port 8000 --auth=proj_name,c:\digest.txt,trac c:\path\to\proj_name

Note: If you would like to use --basic-auth you need to use htpasswd tool from apache server to generate .htpasswd file. The remaining part is similar but make sure to use empty realm (i.e. coma after path). When using on Windows make sure to use -m option for it (did not tested it on *nix, so not sure if that is the case there).

Tips

Serving static content

If tracd is the only webserver used for the project, it can also be used to distribute static content (tarballs, Doxygen documentation, etc.)

This static content should be put in the $TRAC_ENV/htdocs folder, and is accessed by URLs like <project_URL>/chrome/site/....

Example: given a $TRAC_ENV/htdocs/software-0.1.tar.gz file, the corresponding relative URL would be /<project_name>/chrome/site/software-0.1.tar.gz, which in turn can be written using the relative link syntax in the Wiki: [/<project_name>/chrome/site/software-0.1.tar.gz]

The development version of Trac supports a new htdocs: TracLinks syntax for the above. With this, the example link above can be written simply htdocs:software-0.1.tar.gz.

Using apache rewrite rules

In some situations when you choose to use tracd behind apache, you might experience issues with redirects, like being redirected to URLs with the wrong host or protocol. In this case (and only in this case), setting the [trac] use_base_url_for_redirect to true can help, as this will force Trac to use the value of [trac] base_url for doing the redirects.

Serving a different base path than /

Tracd supports serving projects with different base urls then /<project>. The parameter name to change this is

tracd --base-path=/some/path

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See also: TracInstall, TracCgi, TracModPython, TracGuide