Getting Mylyn working with VisualSVN 1.5.2 and Trac 0.11

Posted by TJ Downes at 5:39 PM
0 comments - Categories: Technical Articles | Cool Stuff

Recently we moved our Subversion system to VisualSVN Server. The primary purpose for doing this was to provide easier maintenance of our SVN repositories. So far we are really liking the system and the ability to easily manage our version control.

Using Trac was is also a requirement for us. It is a valuable tool for us in managing bugs, issues and tasks. The folks at VisualSVN have made this integration easy with a tutorial and easy install package you can find here. In all, it took about an hour to setup and configure VisualSVN Server with Trac. Moving our repository to VisualSVN Server proved a bit more work. Since we had a single repository for all of our projects we decided that in the process we would also split our repository into a seperate repository for each client. This would allow us to archive more easily, as well as provide a seperate Trac for each client we work with. I followed the instructions on the 2 Tablespoons blog which made the entire thing a simple process, albeit a bit time consuming. If you are doing this on Windows platform keep in mind that the "cat" command can be replaced with "type".

Lastly, and the reason for this post, is we wanted to get Mylyn up and running in our environment. Mylyn is a great plugin for Eclipse that allows you to manage tasks in Trac via your Eclipse IDE. I did a fair bit of research on the tool and found a lot of good feedback, and something we needed desperately in our shop. Unfortunately, it's not as easy to get up and running on VisualSVN Server for a couple of reasons:

Mylyn does not work with Trac 0.11 out of the box. You need to add the XMLRPC components. Stephen Moretti provides a great blog post on how to get around this on his blog.

Due to the way VisualSVN Server is setup, the above method did not work very well. I received errors from the easy_install process and could not continue. Not to be discouraged, I searched around for an easier method. After a bit of toying around, I realized Trac has a built-in plugin instaler in the admin. All it requires is a Python egg to be uploaded and it handles the rest!

You can find out more about the XMLRPC plugin on the Trac Plugin site. I simply downloaded the zipped source and unzipped it on the server. From there, I followed the instructions on the page for installation, which creates an egg:

# python setup.py bdist_egg
# cp dist/*.egg C:\directory\you\copied\XMLRCP\source\to

Once this is complete, you will find a file named TracXMLRPC-1.0.0-py2.5.egg in your {source directory}\trunk\dist folder (where you unzipped the source of the xmlrpc plugin).

Log into Trac, navigate to the admin page, choose the Plugins link and use the Install Plugin form to upload the egg you created. Once the file has uploaded and installed you will now see a plugin in your list named tracxmlrpc 1.0.0. Expand this plugin and check off the following:

• XMLRPCSystem
• All the component with ".ticket" in the module name
• XMLRPCWeb

Restart VisualSVN Server and you should be good to go!

In the past few days of using Mylyn we have found a much higher level of productivity and we are also finding it much easier to distinguish what change orders are. We have given a couple of our more technical clients direct access to Trac to enter issues into the system and they love it. If you're not using SVN/Trac/Mylyn I definitely recommend spending the time to get setup and learn it. The payoffs are well worth it.