Roundup Issue Tracker

Download: Display current version of Roundup on PyPI. Badge displaying number of downloads per month. Graphic displaying size of newest docker image on hub.docker.com. Build Status: Status of primary regression test job on github.

Roundup is an issue-tracking system that boasts a user-friendly interface and easy installation process. It offers a range of interfaces, including command-line, web, REST, XML-RPC, and e-mail, making it a versatile solution for issue tracking. The system is based on the award-winning design by Ka-Ping Yee, which emerged victorious in the Software Carpentry “Track” design competition.

Roundup is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the system to their specific needs and preferences.

The latest stable version of Roundup is 2.4.0, which includes bug fixes and additional features compared to the previous 2.3.0 release.

Roundup is compatible with Python 2.7.12+ or 3.6+.

Python 2 Support

Python 2 support ends with release 2.4.0 (July 2024). Several Continuous Integration (CI) services are discontinuing their resources for testing with Python 2. Use Python 3 for the deployment of new trackers. Existing trackers should be upgraded to use Python 3.

Release Highlights

Some improvements from the 2.3.0 release are:

  • three CVE’s have been fixed. One requires changes to your tracker’s home directory. The other two are fixed by installing 2.4.0. See https://www.roundup-tracker.org/docs/security.html for details and instructions on how to fix these in 2.4.0 and earlier releases.

  • new classhelper component thanks to a team of students from CS682 at U-Mass Boston. This fixes many issues with the old classhelper. It is implemented as a web-component and needs REST interface access. It will fall back to the classic classhelper if REST is not available or if the browser does not support web-components.

  • fix Windows Python installation using pip. It used to go into an infinite loop during install or download. Also fix installation of shared files (templates) so roundup-admin can find them.

  • using @current_user as a value in a search URL for a user property will use the current logged in user. Now you can share searches like: “My issues” as “my” will become the current logged in user.

  • login failures to the REST/XML-RPC interfaces are now rate limited to limit password guessing attacks.

  • utf8mb4 is the default charset for MySQL. This requires migrating your database using the mysql client. You can choose to keep the older character set in config.ini.

  • PostgreSQL services defined in pg_service.conf can be used. PostgreSQL schemas are supported to eliminate the need for the roundup user to have database creation/deletion privileges.

  • fix out of memory issue when importing larger trackers into PostgreSQL.

  • multiple roundup-admin improvements: display protected properties (like creation date), better formatting of output, command history. Also on windows, pyreadline3 is supported to provide an editable interactive command line.

  • an experimental wsgi performance improvement in 2.3.0 is now now the default and is opt-out.

  • new template functions: utils.readfile and utils.expandfile. Javascript that is included in the Python core will be moved to external files and be able to have values from Roundup substituted in the Javascript.

  • allow content-type of a template to be set from inside the template. This allows returning json or xml from a template without a .json or .xml extention.

  • fix import/export on windows to use Unix style line endings fixing export/import on Windows and making exports portable across platforms.

More info on the 79 changes can be found in the change notes.

Roundup Use Cases

For more information on Roundup see the features list, design overview, and all the other documentation. Roundup has been deployed for:

  • bug tracking and TODO list management (the classic installation)

  • customer help desk support (with a wizard for the phone answerers, linking to networking, system and development issue trackers)

  • issue management for IETF working groups

  • sales lead tracking

  • conference paper submission and double-blind referee management

  • weblogging (well, almost :)

  • thing management using the GTD methodology.

…and so on. It’s been designed with flexibility in mind - it’s not merely another bug tracker.

Try It Out

Roundup ships with a demo tracker to play with - you don’t need to install Roundup. After you’ve unpacked the source, just run “python demo.py” and load up the URL it prints out!

Follow the source gratification mode with these steps (change the -2.4.0 version identifier to match your downloaded file).

  1. python3 -m pip download roundup

  2. tar -xzvf roundup-2.4.0.tar.gz

    • if you don’t have a tar command (e.g windows), use:

      python -c "import tarfile, sys; tarfile.open(sys.argv[1]).extractall();" roundup-2.4.0.tar.gz

  3. cd roundup-2.4.0

  4. python3 demo.py

(The source download can also be used to create a custom Docker image.)

Alternatively, you can install using a virtual environment with pip by:

  1. create a virtual environment with:

    python3 -m venv roundup

  2. activate the environment with (assuming your shell is sh/bash/zsh/ksh like):

    . roundup/bin/activate

  3. install the latest release of Roundup with:

    python3 -m pip install roundup

  4. create a demo tracker with:

    roundup-demo

    using ./demo as the directory and the classic tracker.

  5. load the URL printed by the demo tracker

  6. when you are done, use deactivate to return your shell to using the system python.

Both of these methods produce the same result.

Origin Story

Roundup was originally released as version 0.1.1 in late August, 2001. The first change note written said:

Needed a bug tracking system. Looked around. Tried to install many Perl-based systems, to no avail. Got tired of waiting for Roundup to be released. Had just finished major product project, so needed something different for a while. Roundup here I come…