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 ...

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

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

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

systems, including: * Bazaar * CVS * Darcs *

* 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

Notes

References

External links