Use the Trac plugin

Important

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Launchpad can communicate directly with bug trackers that use Trac through the trac-launchpad plugin.

If you run a Trac instance, you can use the plugin to:

  • share comment histories between bugs that are tracked both in your Trac tracker and also in Launchpad

  • reduce the server load of bug watches from Launchpad.

To start using the plugin, you need to install it in your Trac environment and also tell Launchpad that you’re using the plugin.

Prerequisites

Before installing the Launchpad plugin for Trac, you need to have the following:

  • Trac 0.10.x or 0.11

  • Setuptools for Python

  • TracXMLRPC Plugin (this must be installed for any Trac instance to which you wish to add the Launchpad plugin).

  • (for Trac 0.11+) Genshi 0.5 or better

  • (for Trac 0.10) a couple of patches to the Trac core

Get the plugin

You can download the plugin from its Launchpad project page.

Patch Trac 0.10

If you’re using Trac 0.10, you need to apply the patches, provided in the 0.10-patches directory of the trac-launchpad tarball, to your current Trac installation:

$ cd /path/to/trac; patch -p1 < /path/to/trac-launchpad/0.10-patches/*

System-wide installation

To install the plugin, unpack the tarball to /tmp and run python setup.py install in the unpacked directory:

$ cd /tmp
$ tar zxvf /path/to/trac-launchpad-0.1.2.tgz
$ cd trac-launchpad
$ sudo python setup.py install

Activating the plugin

To activate the plugin in a specific Trac instance, edit $TRAC_ENV/conf/trac.ini and add the following lines:

[components]
tracrpc.* = enabled
tracext.launchpad.* = enabled

[ticket-custom]
launchpad_bug = text
launchpad_bug.label = Launchpad Bug

You must then grant the special launchpad user permission to access the XML-RPC interface, by executing:

$ trac-admin $TRAC_ENV permission add launchpad XML_RPC
$ trac-admin $TRAC_ENV permission add launchpad LAUNCHPAD_RPC

After restarting your webserver, launchpad should be able to sync bugs. In order to verify whether the plugin was enabled correctly, you can always log in with TRAC_ADMIN privileges and then visit $YOUR_TRAC_URL/plugins if you have version 0.11.

Get Launchpad to work with your bugtracker

Once the plugin is installed and working, you need to register your bugtracker with Launchpad, if it isn’t already registered.

Step 1: Visit https://launchpad.net/bugs/bugtrackers

Step 2: Check to see if your bugtracker is registered. If it isn’t, click the Register another bugtracker link at the bottom of the page.

Step 3: Enter your bugtracker’s details and click the Add button.

Step 4: Your bug tracker should now show up in the list of registered bugtrackers.

Step 5: Look through Launchpad to find bugs that are being tracked in Launchpad that are also tracked in your instance of Trac and then link the Launchpad bug reports to your reports in Trac. For example: if there’s an Ubuntu package of your software, look to see if there are any bugs filed against that package that you’re also tracking upstream.

Can’t find suitable bugs in Launchpad?

If you can’t see any suitable bugs already in Launchpad, you can create some test bugs in Launchpad’s staging environment.

Note

The database for staging is reset every day with a fresh copy of Launchpad’s live production database. This can have two impacts:

  • your test bugs will disappear from staging within the next 24 hours

  • if you’ve added your bug tracker to Launchpad’s production environment in the past 24 hours, you need to add it manually to staging.

Troubleshooting

To set up a test tokenserver, edit the environment’s trac.ini as follows:

[launchpad]
auth_server = http://localhost:8081/tokens/%s/+bugtracker-handshake

Find simple_tokenserver.py in the tarball and run as follows:

$ python simple_tokenserver.py +

The plus gives the default policy, which allows all requested tokens to match.

Now visit $TRAC_URL/launchpad-auth/abc in your browser, and you should get an “OK” along with a cookie. Now visit $TRAC_URL/xmlrpc and you should get a listing of XML-RPC endpoints. If you get a listing but Launchpad is not in it, check the permissions for the launchpad user.

Next steps

Once you’ve installed the plugin, file a question using Launchpad Answers to let the Launchpad team know that you’re running the plugin. This will allow the Launchpad Bugs developers and sys admins to finish the setup from their end.

If you’d like to write a Launchpad plugin for another bug tracker, follow our plugin API spec.