BRICCS Trac system

This is a page for discussing the Trac issue tracking system.

Deployment

Trac is currently deployed on briccs-7, a VM hosted on briccs-1.rcs.le.ac.uk

Trac is running on CentOS 5 - which requires python 2.4 for system integrity (yum, among other things, depends upon it). But the latest version of Trac (1.0.1) depends upon python 2.5 or above. EPEL repositories enable the installation of later versions of python, so we have installed python 2.5 but the fun is only beginning.

Apache uses mod_wsgi to deliver Trac - and mod_wsgi as a binary package for CentOS uses the default python (in our case, 2.4, which means Trac does not work). To get mod_wsgi to work with the correct version of python, it must be compiled from source code.

That is now done. Now it should be possible to migrate the Trac system to the new lcbru-trac.rcs.le.ac.uk site, which is provided from LAMP-51.

Access controls

The current system is configured to require password for all write access preventing external users from editing our wiki pages. However, public viewing of the trac wiki is possible, which means we are able to share things on the wiki with people outside the core BRICCS development team.

Based on experience with AstroGrid, the ability to point from people outside the project at pages on our wiki was extremely useful for facilitating discussion and getting advice and ideas from people outside the project.

Password database

The current system uses a simple htacces password file to handle user authentication.

Add passwords to the password file (crypt encrypted by default) by: [root@briccs-7 trac]# htpasswd /var/local/briccs/trac/conf/briccs.htpasswd firstname.surname

There is a Trac module for storing passwords in a database, which should makes managing user accounts and passwords a lot easier. We should consider whether we need to install this before we issue passwords to the hospital staff. Depends how many people need write access.