Trac Links

As you might have guessed, TracLinks are a very fundamental feature of Trac.

They allow hyperlinking between Trac entities (tickets, reports, changesets, Wiki pages, milestones and source files) from anywhere WikiFormatting is used.

TracLinks are generally of the form item:id (where id represents the number, name or path of the item) though some frequently used kinds of items also have short-hand, alternative, notations.

Some examples:

  • Tickets: #1 or ticket:1
  • Reports: {1} or report:1
  • Changesets: [1] or changeset:1
  • Wiki pages: CamelCase or wiki:CamelCase
  • Milestones: milestone:1.0
  • Files: source:trunk/COPYING

Display:

Note: The wiki:CamelCase form is rarely used, but it can be convenient to refer to pages whose names do not follow WikiPageNames rules, i.e., single words, non-alphabetic characters, etc.

Trac links using the full (non-shorthand) notation can also be given a custom link title like this: 

[ticket:1 This is a link to ticket number one].

Display:

This is a link to ticket number one?.

It might seem a simple enough concept at a glance, but actually allows quite a complex network of information.

In practice though, it’s very intuitive and simple to use, and we’ve found the "link trail" extremely helpful to better understand what’s happening in a project or why a particular change was made.

source: links

The default behavior for a source:/some/path link is to open the directory browser if the path points to a directory and otherwise open the log view. It’s also possible to link directly to a specific revision of a file like this: source:/some/file#123 or like this to link to the latest revision: source:/some/file#latest.

Where to use TracLinks

You can use TracLinks in:

  • Source code (Subversion) commit messages
  • Wiki pages
  • Full descriptions for tickets, reports and milestones

and any other text fields explicitly marked as supporting WikiFormatting.

Escaping TracLinks

To prevent parsing of a TracLink, you can escape it by preceding it with a ‘!’ (exclamation mark). 

 !NoLinkHere.
 ![42] is not a link either.

Display:

NoLinkHere. [42] is not a link either.

See also: WikiFormatting, TracWiki