Monday, February 18, 2013

Setup Trac on Raspberry Pi as a Wiki and Issue Tracking Tool

Trac with GIT

Trac is a wiki and issue tracking tool. There are other choices such as redmind and mantisbt. However, Trac is the most suitable one for running on Raspberry Pi because:
  1. it is run by python, which is installed by default for raspbian. (php and ruby are not required)
  2. it is relatively light weight. It can use sqlite as the database, rather than MySQL or PostgresSQL.
  3. it can be run in standalone mode, without using apache or lighttpd. (although I will still use lighttpd to 'proxy' Trac)
  4. It supports modern version control tool such as Subversion and GIT. (redmine also supports, but again, it's not that light weight)
  5. with making use of virtual environment (virutalenv), you can setup Trac without using a privilege account.
  6. it is a mature product and many organizations are using it (http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUsers)

Install and setup Trac

First, make sure virtualenv is already installed. (apt-get install virtualenv)

Remove a file completely in GIT

GIT is a great version control tool. I was a CVS and SVN users but I think GIT is even more powerful. Perhaps I can write something about GIT but now I want to share an experience: How to remove a file completely from GIT.

There is an internal db in GIT. Once your add and commit codes into the repository, the info will be store and the great thing is that you can check out the file at any version. However, I did an stupid thing - I hard coded some personal information (eg password) in a file and commit it to the repository. It won't be a problem if you are the only developer of the project.  But if you need to share the code by cloning the repository to the others, your information can be retrieved, even you delete it in filesystem.

So I did some quick search and find a solution: just runt the following command to remove the history and file:

git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch " HEAD

Make sure you make a copy to some places out of the GIT repository. Then you can copy the file back and add it as a "fresh new" file.

PS. As a better practice, don't hard coded any thing that cannot be shared in a repository !!