Having to use Trac instead of our usual Drupal Project* setup for a new Drupal project, I just found out a problem which perplexed me for a moment: after following the instructions from the Trac site for a very basic setup, without SVN integration, all seems to work well, up to the point where I started the server.

# tracd --port 8000 /var/www/trac/proj1

The problem

... and went to my browser to http://www.example.com:8000/ only to receive an almost empty page, just saying "Available Projects" and nothing else. No error during trac-admin initenv. And the page was well-formed, showing it was likely not an actual bug.

Googling around the problem showed the issue to be already known, but offered no hint about the solution. What could be wrong ?

The solution

(Text displayed in white. Think about the question, then select the text in your browser to reveal the solution).

Well, quite simply, although the default minimal install offers by default a SQLite DB store, it does not check whether SQLite is actually installed on the system, and of course it wasn't. A small apt-get install sqlite, and all was fixed.

D'oh !