Simple issue tracking

Apr 12, 2009 · 2 minute read

Another project I hacked together on the train running on App Engine I’m afraid. Anyone getting bored of my new project each week posts please stop reading now.

Issue or bug tracking is just one of those things we all deal with and probably have opinions on. Lots of open source software exists (BugZilla, Trac) to do the job and various companies have commercial products (Lighthouse, Sifter, Fixx). So why did I go and create another one?

Certainly not because I think I can do a better job for the majority. This is very much a personal pet project and I don’t very much fancy competing with teams of smart people building good products.

Like most software projects my issue tracker was designed to scratch a personal itch. I now have 28 repos over on GitHub (how did that happen?). Some of these are public projects I’d like other peoples input on, and for me that means having a public list of issues. But these aren’t active projects being worked on by a team of people - it’s mainly just me (with Brad and Simon occasionally correcting my spelling and grammar) hacking on the train to work and back. I don’t need collaboration features. I don’t want to be limited to a small number of projects. I’d rather not pay lots of money, or worry too much about hosting.

So that’s where GitBug comes in. Bug tracking for people with minimal needs.

The only real feature past a very minimal bug tracker is the ability to close bugs via a GitHub webhook. Oh and lots of JSON and RSS feeds for everything but that’s just the way we should build things now anyway.

Their are areas of the interface that could do with some streamlining and a couple of open bugs that don’t yet cause me enough pain to fix. I have however opened it up for anyone with a Google account to use and a few people have started adding their own projects and issues already. I’m hoping that for the most part by keeping it as simple as possible I can avoid having to do any work on it and work on bugs in other projects instead, of which I’m sure there are many.