Bitbucket is a new social code hosting site for Mercurial (Hg) users, allowing them to view and interact with one another’s distributed revision control repositories. It’s no stretch to say that it’s inspired by the excellent GitHub site for the Git SCM. Being a fan of the simplicity and elegance of Hg, I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for awhile.

Bitbucket is quite young and still in public beta, and they’re working rapidly to make improvements and squash bugs, but they already have plenty of novel features working. One of the coolest ones that caught my eye is support for patch queues a lá Mercurial Queues. I had a little trouble figuring out how Bitbucket handles patch queues at first, at it’s not documented in their help yet, but with the help of developer Jesper Noehr I was able to work it out. So until those official docs are published, I hope this guide can help some folks.

Apologies for taking so long to post Part II. I had hoped that the templates for the Tags Plugin would be ported to Genshi, or that I’d have time to do so myself, before finishing. Unfortunately neither of those things has happened, and in fact the entirety of trac-hacks.org was down for several weeks. That would have been rather annoying when trying to work through this article…

In Part I, we covered the installation of Trac on a shared host at TextDrive by setting up a user-local Python environment. That, along with PEAK‘s setuptools, made it trivial to install a spanking new version of Trac and its prerequisites (along with a few optional niceties). We also saw a simple authentication set-up, and how to make sure tracd and its HTTP server get restarted if a system reboot is necessary.

Now in Part II we’re going to look at administering and extending Trac with some plug-ins, ranging from small and simple to large, complex tools. Some serve utility functions such as providing attractive web-based frontends for various aspects of Trac configuration, while others add wholly new capabilities to the system. Fortunately, thanks to our preparations in the last article, installing plug-ins is quite easy.

The TextDrive theme continues! Trac-hacks.org has been down for a couple of weeks — apparently the maintainer went out of town shortly before the server tanked — so I’m stalling on Part II of my Trac on TextDrive article. Sorry! Plug-in installation is the focus of the article, so it would be rather frustrating to try to follow along when most of the resources are unavailable…

In the mean time, I’ve been trying out Mercurial and really digging it. Mercurial is a distributed version control system, and we’ll talk a little about why you may want such a thing. Also, it’s written (mostly) in Python, and has a very functional Trac plug-in (that incidentally is not hosted on Trac-hacks currently!), so it seems to fit pretty well into our current theme.

Bill de hOra has written a couple of useful articles on Mercurial set-up that are specific to TextDrive, but they’re “terse” by his own words, and the user-local Python environment that we set up earlier affords us a more straightforward procedure. I’ll also try to pick up where Bill left off by briefly covering Mercurial set-up and use with SSH.

But what is this all about, really? There’s been a lot of chatter recently on the rise of distributed VCSes like Bazaar, git, darcs, etc., and I’m not going to go into detail about opting for one tool over another (Wikipedia has a big comparison matrix if you’re looking for a place to start your own research). Rather than sweating the minutiae that separate these tools, readers here would probably be better served by some discussion of why one may want a distributed SCM in the first place. While I haven’t explicitly covered the use of a VCS in the past, the depth of my Trac articles probably appeals more to the beginner than the seasoned (read: impatient) version control user, and someone just starting with Subversion may wonder why he or she should think about throwing it out and starting over. Read on for more, or you can just jump ahead to the set-up details if you like.

I’m working on a new blog that I’ll actually attempt to publicize, but here’s something to get me moving in the mean time.

In this article, I’m going to present a comprehensive primer for installing and configuring Trac on a TextDrive account, though a lot of the information could be useful to anyone getting started with Trac, or running Python applications on a shared host. In Part II, we’ll extend Trac’s capabilities with some useful plug-ins.

Contents

• A Preamble: What’s Trac?
• The State of Affairs at TextDrive
• A Few Assumptions
• Your Own Little (Python) World
• Trac Prerequisites
• Do the Damn Thing
  • Create a New Environment
  • Upgrade an Existing Environment
• Running Trac for the First Time
• Getting Cozy
  • Set Up a Custom Subdomain
  • Simple Authentication
• Keeping tracd Up and Running
• Bonus: Multiple Environments
• The Next Step

A Preamble: What’s Trac?

Trac is a web-based tool for simplifying software project management — it’s grown to be rather popular these days, and even if you’re not familiar with it already, chances are pretty good that you’ve surfed across a Trac site at some point. If you use a version control system like Subversion for software or web development projects, Trac can provide you (or a team) with syntax-highlighted browsing of the code in your repository, diff file comparisons between arbitrary revisions, a flexible bug-tracking system, and an integrated wiki to document your project. It’s also highly extensible.

Trac is built with Python, and really, much of the set up in this article centers around setting up your own Python environment. Python is a dynamic, interpreted programming language a lot like Ruby in its elegance and efficiency, but with rather different philosophies. This setup will also set you on your way if you’re interested in web development with Python, with frameworks like Pylons, Django or Turbogears. Python is the bee’s knees, and I’ll be covering a lot more of it in the future.

Opera Mini is pretty awesome.

I found out about it when searching the Salling Clicker forums to see if I could get that app working with my mediocre Motorola V551 mobile phone (more on that another day). I think I'm about to be paying more for my data plan...

The Subversion Applescripts included with Growl are a great little timesaver. For that matter, browsing the other included scripts inspired me to consider some repetitive tasks that I should script myself.

Jesse turned me on to VirtueDesktops, a long-needed replacement for DesktopManager, which I've been using I think since Jaguar. Sadly the graphics card in my ancient Powerbook isn't Core Image capable and I don't get the spiffy animations when switching desktops. Until we have Spaces, though (and/or I get a new Powerbook), it's an indispensable app.

Last but not least, Google Browser Sync allows me to pick up where I left off between home and work. Firefox bookmarks and session info are synced through your Google account (with encryption) so you can get right back to those 16 tabs spread across 5 windows...

Now I just wish the Adium plug-in for Quicksilver would work again...