Trac Main Features

Notice: This page doesn't belong to the official Trac documentation.

If you are part of a development project (notably software development) and need to keep track of your issues, milestones and artefacts, and additionally want to keep these in-house - ie not hosted on third-party cloud solutions - then Trac is for you.

There are many other novel ways in which Trac is used, for example as a document management system or when performing requirements management.

Because Trac is licensed under BSD, the platform can be customised to fit within your group workflow. This can be done either through configuration options (TracIni), the installation of plugins or under-the-hood development.

See also: AboutTrac

Manage your project in an open source 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 is open source, you can always make changes yourself, write plugins, or commission someone else to do so to better fit the needs of your project.

It can be used on a number of databases, such as SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL and ​MS-SQL.

Manage project issues

Track the progress of resolving 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.

View your code repository online

Trac gives a highly usable browsing and management front-end for ​Subversion and ​Git. Trac gives you clear and elegant code highlighting and file comparison, so you can easily see how files differ and where changes have been made. Multiple repositories can be connected to Trac.

Using plugins, Trac also supports other ​version control systems. There is even a ​GitHub integration interface.

Manage your users

Anonymous users can view the state of the project, all outstanding tickets and milestones, but users need to register to make changes to issue tickets, milestones and to check in code changes. Trac has a simple permission system to control what users can and can't access. Permissions can be enhanced with the ​AccountManagerPlugin and other plugins.

Manage team knowledge, using the wiki

Trac has a built-in documentation server, which can be used for team communication, managing users and project resources. As it's a ​Wiki, it can be set up to allow shared editing. The wiki uses the MoinMoin syntax and links to tickets, reports and source code.

Wiki pages can start from a customisable template.

Extend the standard functionality through plugins

Trac is extensible through plugins. There is a range of plugins available supporting additional features to Trac core, from anti-spam to Gantt charts and time tracking. All plugins are collected at the ​Trac-Hacks site.

Discussion

• Q: Bug categories?
  • A: You can categorize bugs in many ways. Start on TracTicketsCustomFields. There are priorities, severities and keywords you can use for this. Or maybe you can use ​custom fields for this?
• Q: Development Calendar?
  • A: Think so; at least I see one in our test installation. There are also ​calendar plugins.
• Q: Bug type flow, eg bugs migrate from unconfirmed → prioritized → confirmed → fixed?
  • A: This can be found in trac.ini, see TracWorkflow, and is configurable.
• Q: Is there a "resource planning" possibility? Something that Gantt charts would provide?
  • A: There's a Gantt chart plugin and resource planning plugins at PluginList, check also ​here.
• Q: Consider which features Trac sports/lacks in contrast to other popular systems, such as ​BugZilla, JIRA, Confluence, MediaWiki, FogBugz.
  • A: Wikipedia hosts a ​comparison of issue tracking systems as well as a ​comparison of project management software, although Trac's entry is out of date. There are also these pages on this wiki: [SeaChange/CompetitionSurvey] and BugTrackingSystem.

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

Rationale

This is a page that answers the first FAQ: What is Trac and how can it help me? Other points regarding the nature of this page are best dicussed on the MailingList.