Setting up a fossil server

When I'm working on personal projects, I've usually used a pen and paper to keep track of design issues, bugs to be fixed and so on, but I've recently found myself wanting an actual issue tracking database. My requirements are actually pretty straightforward:

• Must be accessible from a browser
• No PHP
• Easy to set up
• Use SQLite as a database backend if possible (see previous point)

I did some searching and reading around, and I thought about Apache Bloodhound, but I was scared off by the installation instructions. I also briefly looked at Trac which Bloodhound is apparently a fork of, but again, a baffling and intimidating installation procedure left me cold.
Next up Bugzilla, which I spent about 20mins trying to set up, installed a lot of Perl modules, and got some incomprehensible (and even worse, un-google-able) timezone error, so I didn't even get as far as trying to set up an instance of Apache webserver, which I wasn't expecting to enjoy anyway. At least with this one, I tried!
During my earlier research, I had read about fossil, as if you type issue tracker SQLite into a search engine of your choice, fossil will be on the first page of results. This is because it and SQLite are both written by the same person. I'd disregarded fossil as its primary purpose seems to be as a DVCS that happens to have bug tracking (and a wiki!) as additional features on the side. However, it's very very easy to set up a fossil server from a standing start. So very easy, in fact that I managed to get it up and running in under ten minutes, on a server running Debian 6:
After sshing into the box, I installed the distribution version of fossil with apt-get, and created a new user called fossil (because I am terrible at naming things, it turns out).

$ su
# apt-get install fossil
# adduser fossil

Follow the adduser prompts with with password and other information as desired here…
Now, as the fossil user, create a new database in the home directory (called bugs.db—names; terrible).

# su fossil
$ fossil new ~/bugs.db

Make a note of the username/password for your admin account of the fossil site in the output from this command (the username is probably fossil if you specified that to adduser), as you won't be able to do anything useful to the server without admin access. At this point, we could start the server running, but we want to configure it to start up when the machine starts up, so we need to go back to root and edit rc.local:

$ exit
# vim /etc/rc.local

Add this line to the end:

su fossil -c 'fossil server ~/bugs.db'

That's literally all you need to do. Reboot the server and boom, the server should be listening on port 8080 when the server comes back up, and you can log in using the username and password noted earlier. If you want to be all fancy and route HTTP traffic from port 80 over to 8080, you can add another line to rc.local, just before you kick off the fossil server:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i venet0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

If you're anything like me, you'll probably want to spend the next hour or so tweaking the site's CSS and HTML templates and making it your own.
Fossil is a triumph of minimalism—it is literally one single executable file and one database file. It contains a DVCS, wiki, issue tracking and source control browser with a web interface. I'm primarily only interested in the bug tracking for the time being, as at the moment I still want to keep my source code in SVN. But, now that I have a fossil repository available to me, I might want to import my history and give myself the option to work offline, git-style. Another possibility is that I can use the fossil repository to hold releases of my projects, and I can accept and version control patches and bugfixes for each release. Having a (bare-bones) wiki up and running is also nice.
The moral of this story is that from an installation perspective, fossil definitely beats out the competition here. It's not as configurable or as extensible as other solutions, but that doesn't really matter to me if I can't get the other solutions to run in the first place!