Tracks 2.0 Installation HOWTO

Tracks is a very useful TODO application, following the Getting-Things-Done approach.

Unfortunately, the installation of Tracks 2.0 can be a little tricky. Here you find all steps necessary to setup a Tracks 2.0 environment in Ubuntu 11.04 using MySQL as database-backend. Ubuntu 11.04 is running as an OpenVZ guest in this example.

1. Prepare Ubuntu Server

Create OpenVZ Container:

After entering the Container wait for some moments for the startup scripts to complete. Then reconfigure the timezone, stop unnecessary services, purge them and replace sendmail with postfix (using 'Local only' configuration):

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
service apache2 stop
service sendmail stop
service ssh stop
service xinetd stop
apt-get purge xinetd
apt-get purge openssh-server
apt-get purge apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common
apt-get update
apt-get install postfix

Purge unnecessary packages:

apt-get purge sendmail-base sendmail-bin sendmail-cf sendmail-doc rmail sensible-mda
apt-get purge bind9 bind9-host bind9utils libbind9-60 libdns69 libisc62 libisccc60 libisccfg62 liblwres60
apt-get purge samba samba-common samba-common-bin smbfs cifs-utils libwbclient0
apt-get purge mtools tofrodos
apt-get purge snmp libsnmp15 libsnmp-base
apt-get purge lynx lynx-cur lzma
apt-get purge wide-dhcpv6-client
apt-get purge ftp rsync memtester whois libsensors4 telnet tcpdump traceroute

Update the system:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

2. Prepare MySQL Database

apt-get install mysql-server
mysql -u root -p mysql
CREATE DATABASE tracks;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tracks.* TO 'tracks'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'choose-secure-password-here' WITH GRANT OPTION;
quit

3. Install Rails

apt-get install rails
apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8
apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

4. Install Tracks

Execute the following steps (in database.yml change the database username and password, in site.yml change the salt and timezone, you get possible names of your timezone when you execute 'rake time:zones:local'):

cd /opt
wget https://github.com/TracksApp/tracks/zipball/v2.0
unzip v2.0
mv TracksApp-tracks-22a0c94 tracks
rm v2.0
cd /opt/tracks/config
cp -a database.yml.tmpl database.yml
vi database.yml
cp -a site.yml.tmpl site.yml
vi site.yml
cd /opt/tracks
apt-get install libxslt-dev
gem install mysql
gem install sanitize
rake gems:install
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

5. Start Tracks

nohup /opt/tracks/script/server -e production -p 80 &

Links:

I have used the following sources and further information while creating this HOWTO:

• New planned Features (open tickets)
• Installing Tracks 2.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Tracks Wiki)
• Ubuntu 11.04 with lighttpd (Tracks Wiki)
• Linux Ubuntu (Tracks Wiki)
• Tracks Forum Post regarding sanitize (Tracks Forum)