The Joy of Stick

Being a proud user of Request Tracker 0.99 I thought it was time to try a modern version. I installed it in a Ubuntu 6.06 LTS with MySQL as the support rdbs. This synthetise two installation procedures¹ around there that were not so focused.

Installing the packages

sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install request-tracker3.4

You may change for 3.6 if you’re using Ubuntu 7.04. Those two commands installed all I needed. However if you think that something is missing you can type it all.

sudo apt-get install request-tracker3.4 rt3.4-apache rt3.4-clients apache-doc postfix mysql-client mysql-common libdbd-mysql-perl

Editing the RT configuration files

Go to the RT directory and start updating RT_SiteConfig.pm with the info from your site and/or system.

cd /etc/request-tracker3.4
vi RT_SiteConfig.pm

Change the defaults as you need along this lines.

Set($rtname, 'rt.domain.tld);
Set($DatabaseType, 'mysql');
 
Set($DatabaseUser , 'rtuser');
Set($DatabasePassword , 'wibble');
Set($DatabaseName , 'rtdb');
 
Set($WebBaseURL , "http://rt.domain.tld");
 
Set($DatabaseHost,'localhost');
Set($DatabaseRTHost,'localhost');

Edit RT_Config.pm and RT_SiteModules.pm as you need. Don’t forget that these files must finish with 1;

Update RT lib directory

We must now store these customized files along the other RT libs.

sudo cp RT_Config.pm /usr/share/request-tracker3.4/lib/RT/Config.pm
sudo cp RT_SiteConfig.pm /usr/share/request-tracker3.4/lib/RT/SiteConfig.pm
sudo cp RT_SiteModules.pm /usr/share/request-tracker3.4/lib/RT/SiteModules.pm

Database creation

sudo /usr/sbin/rt-setup-database-3.4 --action init --dba rtuser --prompt-for-dba-password

Use the same password you defined in SiteConfig.pm

Apache configuration

Just create a new file for a virtual host. Change 10.0.0.1 for your IP address and costumize ServerName and ServerAdmin

sudo vi /etc/apache/conf.d/rt.conf

NameVirtualHost 10.0.0.1
<virtualhost 10.0.0.1:80>
ServerName rt.domain.tld
ServerAdmin me@domain.tld
DocumentRoot /usr/share/request-tracker3.4/html
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
PerlModule Apache::DBI
ErrorLog /var/log/apache/rt-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache/rt-access_log common
Include /etc/request-tracker3.4/apache-modperl.conf
<location>
SetHandler perl-script
</location>
</virtualhost>

Don’t forget to reload the apache server to read the new configuration

sudo /etc/init.d/apache reload

We made it!

Let’s connect and start creating users, groups, queues and moving tickets away. Point your browser to http://rt.domaind.tld (the address you’ve defined) and login using user root with password password. Change it right now!

1. http://wiki.bestpractical.com/view/UbuntuInstallGuide & http://brucetimberlake.com/linux/rtinstall.html  ↩