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Introduction
What this tutorial is about
This tutorial is designed to be a thorough introduction and installation guide for the great issue tracking tool, Request Tracker (RT). RT fulfills a key need in a project's Configuration Management (CM) process. By the end of the tutorial, you should have a working installation of RT and be ready to implement a CM process for your project. The primary focus of this tutorial is installing RT on the average GNU/Linux system. The tutorial also points out some of the many stumbling blocks involved with the various installation steps. The key word is many as there are quite a few installation steps. Of course, even with this effort to cover potential problems, it cannot possibly cover everything.
What this tutorial is not about
RT's dependence on several and equally complex libraries and tools makes the installation tricky. To guarantee successful completion of this tutorial, you are strongly advised to have some prior experience using and configuring GNU/Linux in general and Perl and Apache in particular. Some sendmail administration experience helps, but it is not as important. At the very least, it helps to have access to a person with such experience. See Resources to further your knowledge of RT, related tools, and configuration management.
Disclaimer about system requirements
Since I cannot safely establish what the average base system is for most users, I will tell you what I used to perform all of the tutorial's steps. I performed installations of RT on fresh installs of Red Hat 7.3, Red Hat 8.0, and Debian 3.0-stable (a total of two times on each system, except for Red Hat 7.3, where I did it three times).
Installation of RT on Red Hat 7.3 (I could generalize to 7.x) and Debian 3.0-stable work just fine with some additional package installations.
However, I should note that Red Hat 8.0 has problems, enough to not recommend it. Red Hat 8.0's default Apache installation version is 2.0. Additionally, 8.0's version of Apache has an embedded version of mod_perl that is incompatible with RT. As of this writing, a basic RT installation does not work with Apache 2.0 (although, some messages on the rt-user mailing list seem to indicate some people have successfully completed an installation). That is not to say RT cannot be installed on a Red Hat 8 machine. A viable workaround is to uninstall Apache 2.0 and install Apache 1.3 in its place. This tutorial, assumes that Red Hat 8.0 is not an acceptable system base for installation.
So what do I call the install base for this tutorial? I consider Red Hat 7.3 to be the working distribution in which these tutorial steps succeed 95% of the time. As for the tools and libraries, I will get into specific versions shortly. This tutorial uses generic package and file installation methods as much as possible, short of recompiling entire applications; it will not be too Red Hat specific.
This tutorial will:
- Introduce you to Configuration Management, in general, and Request Tracker, in particular.
- Explain to you the system requirements for installing RT.
- Help you prepare RT's installation scripts for your system.
- Help you install RT's Perl dependencies.
- Help you install RT.
- Help you configure your system for RT's e-mail and Web interfaces.
- Introduce you to RT's command-line, e-mail and Web interfaces.
- Using the command-line interface, add an RT ticket.
- Using the e-mail interface, add an RT ticket.
- Using the Web interface, add an RT queue.
- Using the Web interface, add an RT group.
- Using the Web interface, add an RT user.
- Using the Web interface, configure a queue's rights.
- Using the Web interface, create your first ticket.
- Using the Web interface, get your first ticket search report on a queue.
- Introduce to you some Japanese Kanji :-)
The tutorial assumes you have some GNU/Linux experience, including modifying Unix files, starting and stopping Unix daemons (this tutorial will assume SysVInit-based scripts), and some basic Unix administration skills. If you think your skillset is a bit limited for finishing this tutorial, consider visiting some of the GNU/Linux-related information in Resources, getting a friend to help, or both. The GNU/Linux resources are all great references for doing good GNU/Linux work.
Introduction to Request Tracker
You are going to focus on the first step to achieving project management utopia: installing RT, the issue tracking system. RT is an open source implementation of an issue tracker written primarily in Perl by Jesse Vincent.
So what, specifically, can RT do? Quite a lot actually. It has interfaces for command-line, e-mail, IRC and the Web. Typically, you will use the Web and command-line interfaces. RT audits all of its operations in a database, making it portable and expandable should your project management tasks grow beyond the capacity of the initial installation machine. Being an issue tracking system at the core, RT is a flexible tool capable of performing tasks unrelated to project management. You can use RT as a public task list, an administrative task manager and journal, or a help desk tool (many companies use RT just for help desk issues).
Installing RT is quite a lengthy task, so you might want to take a break before you move on to the installation section.
Incidentally, one of the great things about the RT project is that it attempts to promote the very concepts of CM that it intends to make better. RT 2.1 uses a revision tracking system called Aegis that, when it is eventually combined with RT, will take care of the software revision and feature tracking that should be coupled with issues. Check Resources for a link to RT's Aegis source project page.
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