Note: This page doesn't belong to the "official" Trac documentation and consists entirely of user contributed comments.

What is Trac?

Exactly what is Trac? What does it do? Do I need Trac? Why is Trac the best /insert class here/ in the field?

Trac Main Features

Open source project management tool

Trac is a lightweight project management tool that is implemented as a web-based application, written in the Python programming language. It emphasizes ease of use and low ceremony, and is ​open source.

Ideal for managing software developments, it is flexible enough to use for many types of projects. As it's open source, if it doesn't quite fit your needs, you could always make changes yourself, write plugins, or commission someone else to do so.

Ticket system

Track the progress of resolving individual bugs, issues, feature requests, and ideas - each with its own ticket (numbered, as in a waiting room queue system). Easily reconcile overlapping tickets (where more than one person reports the same thing). Search and filter tickets by severity, project component, version or owner (among others).

View progress

Trac gives you a number of convenient ways to stay on top of events and changes within a project. You can set milestones, and view a roadmap of progress towards them (as well as historical achievements) in summary. There is a timeline of individual changes so you can see the order of events, starting with the most recent. Trac supports RSS for content syndication: allowing people to subscribe to those changes outside Trac itself, as well as email notification.

Online repository viewing

Trac gives a highly usable browsing and management front-end for ​Subversion, a modern open-source ​version control system. Trac gives you clear and elegant code highlighting and file comparison, so you can easily see how files differ. Using plugins, Trac also supports other version control software.

User management

Trac has a simple permission system to control what users can and can't access.

Wiki

Built-in documentation server, which can be used for developer or user resources. As it's a ​Wiki, it can be set up to allow shared editing. Uses MoinMoin syntax and magic links to tickets, reports and source.

Features provided through plugins

There are a range of plugins available supporting additional features, from anti-spam to Gantt charts and time tracking.

Future features

0.11

PageTemplates

Discussion

Things I don't know Trac has or hasn't: (questions)

• Bug categories? (there's priorities)
• Development Calendar? (think so; at least I see one in our test installation)
• Bug type flow (e.g. bugs migrate from unconfirmed→prioritized→confirmed→fixed)?
• Is there a "resource planning" possibility? Something that Gantt charts would provide, maybe?

Comparisons

To make this page particularly valuable, consider which features Trac sports/lacks in contrast to other popular systems, such as BugZilla, JIRA, Confluence, MediaWiki, FogBugz.

• Wikipedia hosts a ​comparison of issue (& bug) tracking systems …although Trac's entry is a bit out of date.

If this page covers both its relative strengths and weaknesses, this would be a great page — letting potential users know exactly what they'll get, how much work they'll need to do to get it running, and what competing packages can offer!

Rationale

… and why not discuss all of this on the MailingList? ;)

. . . I was trying to create a page that answers the first FAQ: Where is the features summary.

• This page would be a great help for people needing to pick an issue tracking system out of the myriad available.

• Well, I read this, and it did not help me with my question at all: "Could Trac be useful for me and my Projects?"
  • so true, this page eventually needs a total conversion ;-)