I keep hearing various people espousing the joys of task management with Mylyn in Eclipse, so last week I thought I would take a look.Mylyn is easy to install. Just go into Eclipse's Help » Software Updates » Find and Install » Search for new features and add the Mylyn update server. You can find the details of the update server from the Eclipse Wiki When you're given a list of items to install make sure you include the option for the Trac Connector. A quick restart of Eclipse and you're ready to use Mylyn locally and in theory you should be able to add a task respository. If you're on a released version of Trac eg. 0.10.4 you should be able to simply create a repository that points at your Trac installation URL and away you go... With 0.11 Mylyn can't see trac as a valid repository. At this point I kept finding notes saying that you can't use Mylyn with Trac 0.11. I'd also noted from the Mylyn User Guide (link above) that I should be able to use an XML-RPC plugin, but look at this also seemed to suggest that there were problems and the examples look scary. Its actually very simple to set up, the examples are for the API if you want to build your own XML-RPC interfaces and it definately does work! If you've installed Trac 0.11, you should have installed the Python setuptools, so installing the XML-RPC plugin is really easy!
easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/xmlrpcplugin/trunk/
One thing to note - I used the trunk version of the plugin. The tagged version 0.10 doesn't work with Trac 0.11 Restart apache and thats it... What you'll need to do now is go into the plugin admin in trac web admin for the project you want to use as a task repository. You'll need to enable the following components in the tracxmlrpc plugin:
- XMLRPCSystem
- All the component with ".ticket" in the module name
- XMLRPCWeb
Give Apache a quick restart. Now when you setup a task repository in Mylyn in Eclipse, make sure you chose "XML-RPC Plugin (rev. 1950)" as the Access Type under Additional Settings. With a valid user name to access your repo, you're now ready to start building queries in the task list. I really like the interface that Mylyn gives you in eclipse. Now I need to play with all the extra options you get for planning and adding context. Only two bothers I've noticed so far:
- I tried to add my queries into folders, but no matter how much I try they all just end up in the top level.
- As I wrote this I noticed that actions in our custom workflow aren't showing up
UPDATE : As Don has noted below - to enable the components in the XMLRPC plug-in I recommend using the web admin. This is one of the other superb features of Trac 0.11 - webadmin built in already. No need to have to learn about plug-in when you're first starting with Trac. ;)
17 responses to “Trac 0.11 and Mylyn.”
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Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM Great tutorial - thanks very much :)
Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM thanks works great (so far).
finally an integration between ide and ticket-tool.
Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM One quick note.
I found your instructions to be quite useful in getting eclipse talking to my trac. I was slightly confused by your activation instructions for the plugin. You may want to highlight that you used the web admin tool. (I started at the command line / trac.ini file originally)
The other problem I ran into was that the permissions needed to be tweaked for my python eggs directory.
Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM Thanks for these super simple steps to get Mylyn to work with Trac 0.11. This likely saved me hours. It's also nice to see the help coming from a fellow CF dev. Cheers.
Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM Thanks, it's working for me, and it was pretty easy =)
Mar 13, 2008 at 9:39 PM This will actually work with multi-project trac and digest HTTP authentication. For the multi-project trac just point at the full url of the project. The digest just has a bug with the HTTP request, which currently has a patch and is being worked on, basic rule is that you just have to keep your request sizes small (more filters). More details at
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=214341
Jul 1, 2008 at 10:03 PM Cheers! Great simple instructions.
Sep 3, 2008 at 9:45 AM Thank you, for this hack.
I was installed Eclipse 3.4 and added last Mylyn updates that works only with Trac 0.9 and 0.10, but I had 0.11 already.
Btw, for I proper work, I was need to enable all components under TracXMLRPC 1.0.0.
Sep 26, 2008 at 1:45 PM TNX, was strugglin' to get mylyn work with trac 0.11 and your quick guide saved my life.
Sep 29, 2008 at 5:20 PM THANK YOU!!!!
It works for me, and was the piece I was looking for to integrate eclipse and trac.
I also had to enable all components under TracXMLRPC, but this is not an issue for me (I'm working on an intranet)
Nov 13, 2008 at 1:32 PM Just thank-you!
Nov 20, 2008 at 9:26 PM The biggest thing missing is you need to grant
XML_RPC to the users that need access to login from eclipse.
With 0.11 the webadmin is installed as a core feature, but it too needs to be permissioned.
For both of these, trac-admin /path/to/trac/repository permission add rbuckland TRAC_ADMIN XML_RPC
Then from there it is just a matter of logging in.
My trac.ini already had
[components]
tracrpc.* = enabled
Nov 24, 2008 at 11:23 PM Thanks... I owe you one ;)
Mar 5, 2009 at 3:43 PM Has anyone had problems connecting with the Mylyn connector to a trac installation with SSL? It's a self signed cert, but the connection keeps timing out and the apache logs don't even show a connection attempt.
Mar 20, 2009 at 9:16 AM Can you post utf-8 comment use mylyn.
I get 500 error
the utf-8 char encoded with unicode.
Mar 26, 2009 at 5:59 AM Thanks!! Another fellow CF developer that is looking to integrate Trac and Eclipse. I'll try your instructions tomorrow.
May 21, 2009 at 3:32 AM This was very useful, thanks for making it clear. Also thanks to Ramon for giving me a way to get access for everybody on the team.