llongi's blog

Just a quick note in case I or others run into this again...
I use Trac to manage a few projects, more specifically Gentoo's www-apps/trac package to ease its deployment. One feature of the package I take advantage of is the init-script to manage the tracd standalone server.
I now wanted to enable authentication for my Trac installs, and all guides out there tell you to add:

--auth="*,/path/to/digest/auth/file,domain"

to your commandline when starting Trac (notice the quotes!), I tried this on the shell, and it worked as expected. I thus changed the TRACD_OPTS variable in /etc/conf.d/tracd to the following:

TRACD_OPTS="--auth=\"*,/path/to/digest/auth/file,domain\"
--env-parent-dir /var/lib/trac/"

It started fine but authentication didn't work at all... Somewhat baffling, but after some investigation, I noticed that the quotes around the --auth argument were passed as-is to tracd, which then failed to find the environment *, since when splitting the --auth argument apart, "* would be used as environment name.
The solution is simply to not set any type of quotes when starting tracd through the provided init-script, so that TRACD_OPTS looks as follows:

TRACD_OPTS="--auth=*,/path/to/digest/auth/file,domain
--env-parent-dir /var/lib/trac/"

In hindsight logical, as the TRACD_OPTS variable gets evaluated only once and then passed to start-stop-daemon, which passes the arguments verbatim to tracd.