Lone Wolves

I have recently read Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen. My geek life is the usual “too much to do in so little time” and I keep forgetting all kinds of important stuff. I saw a lot of FOSS sites covering GTD in the past few months so I decided to give it a go, read the book and play with all kinds of software. I quickly came across Tracks, a nice looking GTD application to manage your actions.

Unfortnately it's written in Ruby on Rails which can be a bit of a pain to set up under Linux, especially if you want to use Apache as the webserver instead of the built-in WEBrick server. I’m already running Apache on my server and I didn’t feel like running a second webserver on a different, non-standard port just for this one app. It took me quite a bit of time to piece it all together, but here’s how I set up Tracks in Debian Lenny.

Installing Ruby on Rails and mod_fcgid

Installing Ruby on Rails is the easy part. Starting with Debian Lenny it all comes prepackaged, so all we need to do is install a couple of packages from the repository.

The last two packages aren’t strictly necessary for Ruby on Rails, but they are dependencies for Tracks. If you are going to use sqlite as the database backend for Tracks, you can skip libmysql-ruby.

Installing and configuring Tracks

Now it gets a bit hairier. First off, none of the currently released versions of Tracks will work on Debian Lenny. There appears to be some conflict between Ruby 1.8.7 and both Tracks 1.5 and tracks 1.6. I have no idea if the problem is caused by Tracks, Ruby or the Debian packagers but it simply won’t work. You will get strange NoMethodError errors or simply a HTTP 500 server error. So, we will need to install the current development branch of Tracks instead.

You can download Tracks 1.7-devel from GitHub. Unpack it somewhere conveniently. In my example I will be installing Tracks to /var/www/tracks-devel. Installation is pretty much as described in the Tracks manual.

First copy log.tmpl, config/database.yml.tmpl and config/environment.rb.tmpl to the variants without the .tmpl extension. Then you can edit database.yml and environment.rb to suit your needs. If you are using a MySQL database then you will need to populate the new database with tables.

Now it’s time to configure Apache and tell it to run Tracks using mod_fcgid. In the example below I will be running tracks in it's own virtual host on http://tracks.example.org, so change that to whatever meets your need. Start off with a basic virtual host configuration.

Now we add a handler for fcgi files and tell Apache to execute these with fcgid. We also add a RAILS_ENV environment variable to tell Tracks to execute in production mode instead of in development or test mode.

Now we need a bit of mod_rewrite magic. In the current setup, not all the requests end up properly at the dispatch.fcgi script. We use a rewrite rule to rewrite all requests to dispatch.fcgi with the exception of requests for actually existing files. If we don’t add that exception then CSS sylesheets and javascript files cannot be loaded.

Now you can restart Apache and visit http://tracks.example.org/signup in order to create your Tracks admin account and start using it. Below is the full Apache configuration file. I hope this will help you to get things done!