Using trac

In a previous post, I described installing trac, a Web-based project management system.

Now you can go to http://myserver.org/trac/ (substituting your server's hostname, of course), and you should see a link for your project. Clicking the link takes you to that project's homepage, which is a wiki. You can use this to provide as much or as little documentation as you like for your project.

One of the first things you'll want to do is to click the Admin link (upper-right, which would not be present without the WebAdmin plugin). The main admin page lets you set the name, URL, and description of your project. Clicking the Permissions link (left-hand side) lets you change who has what permissions to the project. By default, anonymous users have just about every right--you will probably want to revoke these rights, and then just dole them out on a per-user as-needed basis (for example, you may want to give people testing your project permission to create tickets). The WebAdmin plugin also lets you manage components, versions, milestones, and other items through the Web interface (you'd otherwise have to use the trac-admin command-line tool for all that).

The Browse Source link lets you poke around in your repository, even looking at the different revisions.

But my favorite feature is the ability to create and manage tickets. Clicking the New Ticket link lets you create a new ticket, in which you can enter a description of a problem with your project, the affected version, the relevant component, etc. (most of these fields are optional). And the View Tickets link lets you run pre-configured queries to display your tickets (you can also create your own custom ticket queries, but I've found the default set perfectly adequate).