I just finished the migration of my trac installation to redmine. The redmine migrate_from_trac documentation helped a lot, but there were some issues that didn’t work quite as described; this post will describe the correct steps I had to follow in order to import my old trac data (tickets, wiki pages, etc) in redmine.

1. Use Redmine 0.8.x stable

I lost some time with the current trunk version (r2571) until I realized that the importer is broken in trunk. Use the latest stable 0.8.x version, and if you want to use trunk, upgrade to it after you have the trac data inside redmine. While using trunk all was working fine (no error or anything strange), just the wiki pages were not imported in the redmine project. Anyway, I will assume you have a working clean installation of redmine 0.8.x before we will move on. Read the rest of this entry »

Trac uses an internal database to store its data, meaning some extra care needs to be taken when backing up a trac project. This means that we can’t just copy/tar/gz/etc the folder and we need to make sure the database is properly closed and no one is writing to it at that particular time. Of course this is useful for big installation, while for a small trac usage install, you can probably just tar gz the trac folder and be just fine. But even in that case, I would choose the safe method and do it right because it is so easy: the trac-admin command provides the hotcopy switch just for this.

Basically all you have to do is:
trac-admin <trac_project_path> hotcopy <backup_path>
and of course if you are familiar with svn you will notice that it is similar to the way you use svnadmin hotcopy
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a link to my post about how to upgrade to trac 0.11 I’ve written at the “Linux System Admins Blog“. Check it out if you have to upgrade to trac 0.11 it might be useful