How to Report Bugs

If you find a bug in a plugin that you would like to report, you should collect some useful information before creating a ticket. You can use this link or the New Ticket link on the main navigation provided you properly select the ticket Component, but if you are unsure it is better to use the link on the plugin's home page. Search for existing tickets before creating a new one.

Describing the Bug

You should first discover a repeatable sequence of steps to replicate the defect. Writing a few sentences will be very helpful. If you are unable to replicate your bug, make a ticket anyway, and just provide as much information as possible.

Collecting Debug Messages

Plugins should use debug messages logged to file to help determine where the problem occurs. If your bug is not only functional, but also accompanied by an error message or traceback, you should collect the debug messages after configuring the logger.

The logger is configured by editing your trac.ini configuration file:

[logging]
log_type = file
log_level = DEBUG

Equivalently, you can set those parameters through the Admin Logging page (/admin/general/logging). More information can be found on the TracLogging page.

After replicating your bug again, go to the $env/log directory and open the log file, which by default is named trac.log. Collect any lines near the error message that you think are relevant and post them in the ticket. The log lines should be enclosed in triple brackets ({{{ }}}) when pasting the content into a ticket. If your log content is particularly lengthy you should instead attach the log file to the ticket.

Describing Your System

Many bugs are platform dependent, so you should summarize your system information in the beginning of the ticket. Relevant is your exact Trac version (1.0.9), the web server you are serving Trac through (Apache+mod_wsgi, Apache+mod_python, Nginx+FCGI, tracd, ...), the database backend (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, ...), operating system (Windows, Debian Linux, RedHat Linux, MacOS, ...) and of course the plugin's version.

Example:

DiscussionPlugin: 0.10 (r1941)
Trac: 0.10.3 ubuntu package
Server: Apache 2.0.59 + mod_python 3.2.10
Database: sqlite 3.3.5 + pysqlite 2.3.1
OS: Linux

The information can be found on the About Trac page (/about). You should also include any plugin-specific configuration that you've added to trac.ini.