Trac

Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Trac integrates with major version control systems including ( "out of the box") Subversion and Git. Trac is used, among others, by the Internet Research Task Force, Django, FFmpeg, jQuery UI, WebKit, 0 A.D., and WordPress.

Trac is available on all major operating systems including Windows via Installer or Bitnami, OS X via MacPorts or pkgsrc, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch Linux or FreeBSD, as well as on various cloud hosting services.

History

Inspired by CVSTrac, Jonas Borgström and Daniel Lundin from Edgewall Software started writing ''svntrac'' in August 2003 using SQLite and Subversion. In December 2003 they renamed it to ''Trac''. In February 2004 the Trac version was changed first from 0.0.1 to 0.1 and then directly from 0.1 to 0.5. That release was followed in March 2004 by 0.6 and 0.7, and 0.8 in November 2004.

Edgewall Software is an umbrella organization for hosting edgewall.org for the community to collaborate on developing open source Python software. It used to offer software development, consulting and support services. Some of the earliest community members to collaborate in the open source development of Trac were Rocky Burt in March 2004, Christopher Lenz and Francois Harvey in May 2004, Christian Boos and Otavio Salvador in December 2004 and Mark Rowe March 2005.

In August 2005 the license was changed from GPL-2.0-or-later to BSD-3-Clause. The first release under this final license was Trac 0.9 in October 2005, which among other features introduced PostgreSQL database support.

Trac 0.10, released in September 2006, was an important release that first introduced the component system that to this day allows plugins to extend and add features to Trac's core. Trac itself since this point consists mainly of optional plugin components that can be disabled or replaced entirely. MySQL database support is added as one such core component. This release added support for version control systems other than Subversion by external plugins. Mercurial support was provided through a separate plugin due to its GPL license restrictions. Trac 0.11, released in June 2008, changed the HTML template system from ClearSilver to Genshi, breaking compatibility with many of the older plugins.

Trac 0.12 was released in June 2010 and became a stable long term release with the latest point release 0.12.7 from July 2015. It added internationalization and localization support using ''Babel'', and allows using multiple version control repositories at once.

Trac 1.0 was released in September 2012, the previous stable long term supported version with the latest point release 1.0.13 from September 2016. It included the previously external plugin for Git version control support.

Trac 1.1.1 from February 2013 through 1.1.6 from July 2015 are releases without long term support and compatibility guarantees, that turned into Trac 1.2 from November 2016.

Trac 1.4 from August 2019 is the current stable release with long term support. It requires Python 2.7 and uses the Jinja template system.

Trac 1.6 is under active development, which works exclusively on Python3. Many of the plugins have also been rewritten to work on Python3 as well as Jinja.

Core features

Trac offers a no-frills approach to project management by deeply integrating ticket tracking, version control (for which multiple repositories per environment are supported), and wiki. It allows hyperlinking information between these systems, include wiki content directly in a ticket or list tickets automatically on wiki pages.

The ticket system can be used for tracking bugs, tasks, issues, incidents or any other kind of ticket. Customized reports can be generated from parametric stored SQL queries or using an interactive ticket query system. There is also an integrated search engine and a fine-grained permission system.

Additional project management features include grouping tickets into milestones and a roadmap where the milestones and their progress are listed and visualized. The recent activity is shown on a timeline page, and users are notified by email or can subscribe to RSS or iCalendar feeds.

Additional features

Trac has an extensive plugin ecosystem which offers many optional features and integration with external tools, and keeps the core system simple and easy to use. Besides the core SVN and Git support, Trac can connect via plugins to many other version control systems, including:

* Bazaar
* CVS
* Darcs
* Mercurial
* Monotone
* Perforce

Other features provided by plugins include:

* Account Manager, for user administration purposes
* Multiple project support
* Spam-Filtering
* Blog plugin
* Discussion/Forum plugin
* Guestbook plugin
* Pastebin plugin
* XML-RPC plugin, which allows other applications to interact with Trac
* Tags plugin, for adding and managing keywords
* Continuous integration plugins

See also

* Comparison of project management software
* Comparison of issue-tracking systems
* Software configuration management
* TracExplorer - Visual Studio and TortoiseSvn Bugtraq Integration
* Agilo for Trac is an agile Scrum tool based on Trac.
* Apache Bloodhound is built on top of Trac to add multiple projects support, ease of installation and ease of use.
* Apache Allura Python based project management software
* Kallithea Python based project management software with good code review support
* Redmine though developed in Ruby its design was significantly influenced by Trac

Notes

References

External links

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{{Wiki software

Free project management software
Free software programmed in Python
Free wiki software
Bug and issue tracking software
Cross-platform free software
2003 software
Software using the BSD license