So in my quest for learning more about GTD life I tried numerous applications (Actiontastic, Kinkless, Frictionless, ThinkingRock, and of course using Entourage & Mail). Nonethless, I came across Tracks and really liked what I saw. The big bummer was just getting the thing installed. I couldn’t get it to work either locally (on my computer) or remotely (on my DreamHost server).
After gleaning instructions from here and here, I’ve added my results. I don’t know why or how, but I have not been able to achieve a successful Tracks installation at all using FTP! I use TransmitFTP for all my FTP needs but for some reason I’ve only been able to gain access using the SVN import. So if you find that ftp’ing everything up still gives you errors you may want to try these out:
From the Dreamhost (or, in essence any other host that supports Rails) Control Panel
1. make a subdomain pointing to ~/tracks/public/. Be sure to have the “Fast CGI” option enabled.
2. make a new MySQL database you will use for accessing the Tracks installation.
SSH to your Dreamhost account
ssh username@domain.com
… and complete your login credentials to access your account. This will place you at your home directory.
Now start the tracks installation
1. Create the directory you want to run Tracks from:
imarichardson$ mkdir tracks
2. Create a stub rails application first. This will setup your initial rails settings and prevent the issue with missing .htaccess files that some people experienced. Once the rails app is created enter the directory:
imarichardson$ rails tracks imarichardson$ cd tracks
3. Now checkout the tracks installation from snv. At the time of this writing the current version of Tracks is 1.043.
imarichardson$ svn checkout --username guest http://www.rousette.org.uk/svn/tracks-repos/tags/tracks-1.043 ./ When prompted for the password enter "guest" again.
4. Now you need to navigate to the config directory, rename the “.tmpl” files, and update the database.yml & environment.rb files:
imarichardson$ cd config imarichardson$ cp database.yml.tmpl database.yml imarichardson$ cp environment.rb.yml environment.rb
5. At this point you’ll have new database.yml and environment.rb files. You can use whatever editor you like to update the files. I particularly use pico. (i.e., pico database.yml). Edit the database.yml file so that the production database points to the database you are using for the application. Edit the environment.rb file so that the “ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = ‘production’” line is uncommented (line 5 remove the starting pound sign). This will make the app run in production mode.
Run chmod 600 database.yml to make sure folks can’t access your db information.
6. Next navigate to the tracks /public directory.
imarichardson$ cd .. imarichardson$ cd public
7. Since there have been a few issues regarding performance we’ll edit the .htaccess file so that we are using the dispatch.fcgi instead of the dispatch.cgi. (Once again using pico, pico .htaccess) and edit the line near the bottom that reads “RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]” to be “RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]“.
8 Now navigate back to the root and create a log directory and copy the .tmpl info into it.
imarichardson$ cd .. imarichardson$ mkdir log imarichardson$ cp log.tmpl/* log
9. That’s it! Now run the migration and access you have.
imarichardson$ rake db:migrate
10. Navigate to your domain/signup directory and off you go!
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