Trac is an
open-source, web-based
project management
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...
and
bug tracking system
A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system.
Many bug tracking systems, such as thos ...
. 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
Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...
. Trac is used, among others, by the
Internet Research Task Force
The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is an organization, overseen by the Internet Architecture Board, that focuses on longer-term research issues related to the Internet. A parallel organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), fo ...
,
Django,
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...
,
jQuery UI
jQuery UI is a collection of GUI widgets, animated visual effects, and themes implemented with jQuery (a JavaScript library), Cascading Style Sheets, and HTML. Using the Shodan search engine query term cpe:"cpe:/a:jquery/jquery_ui" we can dete ...
,
WebKit
WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the P ...
,
0 A.D., and
WordPress
WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...
.
Trac is available on all major
operating systems including
Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
via Installer or
Bitnami,
OS X via
MacPorts
MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a package manager for macOS and Darwin. It is an open-source software project that aims to simplify the installation of other open source software. It's similar in function to Fink and the BSD ports collection ...
or
pkgsrc
pkgsrc (''package source'') is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 19 ...
,
Debian,
Ubuntu
Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...
,
Arch Linux
Arch Linux () is an independently developed, x86-64 general-purpose Linux distribution that strives to provide the latest stable versions of most software by following a rolling-release model. The default installation is a minimal base system, ...
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
SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the m ...
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
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...
database support is added as one such core component. This release added support for
version control systems other than Subversion by external plugins.
Mercurial
Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux.
Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, d ...
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
In computing, internationalization and localization (American) or internationalisation and localisation (British English), often abbreviated i18n and L10n, are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional peculiarities and ...
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
Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...
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
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...
by deeply integrating
ticket tracking,
version control
In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
(for which multiple repositories per environment are supported), and
wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...
. 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
The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) is a media type which allows users to store and exchange calendaring and scheduling information such as events, to-dos, journal entries, and free/busy information, a ...
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
In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
systems, including:
*
Bazaar
*
CVS
*
Darcs
*
Mercurial
Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux.
Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, d ...
*
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
XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edit ...
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
The following is a comparison of project management software.
General information
Features
Monetary features
See also
* Kanban (development)
* Project management software
* Project planning
* Comparison of scrum software
* Comparison ...
*
Comparison of issue-tracking systems
This article is a comparison of issue tracking systems that are notable, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, as well as asset management systems. The comparison includes client-server application, d ...
*
Software configuration management
*
TracExplorer - Visual Studio and TortoiseSvn Bugtraq Integration
*
Agilo for Trac is an agile Scrum tool based on Trac.
*
Apache Bloodhound
Apache Bloodhound is an open source web-based project management and bug tracking system. The program is built on top of Trac. It is developed and maintained by volunteers at the Apache Software Foundation.
The Bloodhound project was initially ...
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
Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated subprojects. It features per project wikis and forums, time tracking, and flexible, role-based acc ...
though developed in
Ruby
A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called ...
its design was significantly influenced by Trac
Notes
References
External links
*
{{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