NAME¶
cvstrac - Low-ceremony bug tracker for projects under CVS
SYNOPSIS¶
cvstrac [ command [ params ... ] ... ]
DESCRIPTION¶
The
cvstrac command is used to run the CVSTrac web service, or to
initialise new databases for projects.
Please read the section titled
Security and Setup for details of the
default password and why you should change it.
This manual page was written for the Debian distribution because the original
program source does contain a manual page. However CVSTrac is well documented
at the CVSTrac Wiki, <
http://www.cvstrac.org/cvstrac/wiki>, and you will
be able to fin d more up-to-date information there.
OPTIONS¶
Running cvstrac without options produces a usage message. A summary of the
command sequences which can be passed to cvstrac is included below. For more
details, see
/usr/share/doc/cvstrac on this system.
- chroot dir user
- Tells cvstrac to put itself into the chroot gaol dir and switch to
the named user, dropping root privileges. These three parameters must be
the first passed to cvstrac, and processing of command line parameters
continues as normal after the chroot.
- init dir project
- Initialises a new CVSTrac database. dir is the name of the
directory in which you want the database to reside, and project is
the name of the project that CVSTrac will be hosting. The database file
will be created as dir/project.db
The following parameters cause CVSTrac to begin responding to HTTP requests by
various methods. You will need to set up the database before use to ensure
that only authorised users have administrative access.
PLEASE READ and
understand the section below entitled
Security and Setup before using
these commands, because unless you understand what to do you'll be leaving
your system vulnerable to arbitrary code execution as the user invoking
CVSTrac.
- http dir [ project ]
- Causes CVSTrac to start running as an HTTP server on the standard input,
displaying responses to the standard out. dir should be the name of
a directory holding project database or databases created by cvstrac
init and project is the name of a project database without the
".db" extension, as for cvstrac init. If the latter
option is given, access is restricted to just the named project DB, and
the access URL will change slightly. See below for details.
- cgi dir [ project ]
- Causes CVSTrac to respond as a CGI script. dir and project
are interpreted as for cvstrac http. This invocation can be
installed into a simple shell or Perl CGI script anywhere on a server
supporting the Common Gateway Interface.
- server port dir [ project ]
- Causes CVSTrac to run as a self-hosted HTTP server on the specified port.
dir and project are interpreted as above.
Access to CVSTrac¶
CVSTrac accesses databases created by its own
init command, and is
accessed remotely by HTTP. If you did not specify a single project to access
in any of the
http, cgi, or
server commands, then the
running CVSTrac instance can be used to access any database in that directory
simply by modifying the URL, but you will need to supply the name of the
database in order to access it.
For self-hosted
server instances of CVSTrac, and
http instances
started from inetd, the URL to use is of the form
if you specified a project in the invocation, or
if you didn't.
If running as a CGI script, simply use the URL you would normally use for the
CGI script, with the project name you wish to access tacked on if necessary,
as above.
For details of the default password, and why you should change it, read on!
Security and Setup¶
Once CVSTrac is installed and running, you should immediately access it as the
setup user, and change the password. The username and password of the setup
user are both "setup". Passwords, rather counterintuitively, are
changed by following the "Logout" hyperlink at the bottom of the
main menu on the start screen.
The setup user is able, in normal operation, to configure the service in a way
that can cause arbitrary code to be executed under the same userid as CVSTrac
itself. You should be aware of this, and the fact that this can easily lead to
more serious exploits if the setup user is compromised.
The chroot functionality described above is not a perfect fix for this, but can
be used as an additional security measure. See the section below entitled
Runtime Dependencies for details of what binaries the chroot gaol will
need.
Access to the CVS repository¶
CVSTrac should be installed running as a user with read access to the CVS
repository specified during the interactive setup. Certain commands, such as
the ability to modify
CVSROOT/passwd require the write permissions too.
Runtime Dependencies¶
Besides its libraries, CVSTrac requires the following binaries by default:
co, rcsdiff, rlog and
diff. If running cvstrac on
a Debian system, these will have been installed as dependencies of the
cvstrac package, or as part of the base system.
SEE ALSO¶
The CVSTrac wiki
http://www.cvstrac.org/cvstrac/wiki and
/usr/share/doc/cvstrac/examples on this system.
AUTHOR¶
This manual page was written by Andrew Chadwick <andrewc@piffle.org>, for
the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).