1. Installing Mantis On Dammam

Bug tracking is a necessity. Your developers depend upon an easy way to of track those bugs, otherwise it would be difficult to know what issues are plaguing the system and what issues have been resolved.

I recently walked you through the process of installing osTicket. The one asset that particular system is missing is a viable mobile app. Considering users are no longer seated at their desks, developers need a more efficient way of helping users submit bugs. There are a couple of osTicket mobile apps available, but they either won't connect to the server or are too buggy to use. And using osTicket through the mobile browser isn't the best option.

This post contains a guide on setting up Mantis BugTracker on IIS 7 with SQL Server as. Setting up MantisBT on IIS 7 w/ SQL. Install PHP on IIS. Setup Mantis. Answers to Mantis Tiller Questions regarding maintenance, preventative maintenance, using your Mantis garden tiller and more from mantis.com.

Fortunately, osTicket isn't the only game in town. There are a few open source bug tracking systems available, one of which is MantisBT. This particular bug tracking system has a mobile app that can be found in both the Google Play Store and Apple iTunes. Unfortunately, the mobile apps are so out of date that they won't connect to the latest MantisBT server. However, the newer versions of MantisBT are so well designed that they work beautifully in a mobile browser, so there's really no need for a mobile app. Before you can use the service on your mobile device, you must first have MantisBT up and running on your server. I'm going to walk you through the process of installing this bug tracker on Ubuntu 16.04. It's not terribly challenging, but does require you to work from the command line.

Let's get this done.

Dependencies

The first thing you must do is have your full LAMP stack up and running. This can be done with a single command. From the terminal, issue the command sudo tasksel. In the resulting window (Figure A), scroll down and select LAMP server (scroll with your cursor keys and select with your space bar).

Figure A

During the installation, you will be prompted to create and verify a password for the MySQL root user. Make sure you remember this password.

You will also need to install mbstring for PHP. This is done with the command:

Next you need to download the latest version of MantisBT (as of this writing, 2.13.1). Do that with the command:

Installing Mantis On Dammam

While that file is downloading, we need to configure PHP. Open up the php.ini file for editing with the command:

Make sure the following lines look like you see below:

NOTE: If your timezone isn't the same as above, make sure you change it according to this guide. Save and close that file. Restart Apache with the command:

Next we need to change the permissions of a directory and move the mantis folder. This is done with the following commands:

Installation

Before we run the installer, we need to create a virtual host. Issue the command sudo nano /etc/apache/sites-available/mantis.conf. In that new file, add the following contents:

Where SERVER_IP is the IP address of the server hosting MantisBT.

Enable that site with the command:

Finally, issue the command sudo cp /var/www/html/mantis/config/config_inc.php.sample /var/www/html/mantis/config/config_inc.php. Open that file for editing and make sure to add a random 16 character string in the $g_crypto_master_salt entry, so that it looks something like:

It needs to be a minimum of 16 characters.

Restart Apache with the command sudo systemctl restart apache2.

Open up a browser and point it to http://SERVER_IP/mantis. You should see all of the pre-installation checks listed as GOOD. Scroll down and take care of filling in all the necessary installation options. Once you've filled everything out, click Install/Upgrade Database. This will create the necessary database. If, in the next screen, you see an error writing the configuration file, you'll need to follow the instructions and copy and paste the included text or manually edit the entries into the /var/www/html/mantis/config/config_inc.php file. Once you've done that, scroll down and click Continue. You can then log into the account with the credentials administrator/root. You will want to immediately change the administrator user password.

At this point, you can start creating and managing projects.

Connecting on your mobile device

Once again, don't bother installing the mobile app. Instead, fire up your mobile browser and point it to http://SERVER_IP/mantis (where SERVER_IP is the IP address of the server hosting MantisBT). You should be greeted with the login, where you can log in with your account credentials. Once you've successfully authenticated, you can start using MantisBT via your mobile browser. As you can see (Figure B), the design of the site works quite well within the mobile browser.

Figure B

And that's all there is to getting the MantisBT bug tracking system up and running, and using it with your mobile device. Enjoy tracking those bugs.

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Mantis is a free and open source issue tracker written in PHP language. It provides an easy to use web interface for tracking your applications. You can easily manage a project and track your application bugs using Mantis.

Mantis comes with lots of features, some of them are listed below:

• Supports email notification when changes being made to issues in the system.
• Easily customizable.
• Revision control of text fields and notes.
• Full-text search and anonymous access.
• Comes with over 50 plug-ins which extend the functionality of Mantis.

Here, we will explain how to install Mantis Bug Tracker on CentOS 7 server.

Requirements

• A CentOS 7 server installed on your system.
• A sudo user with root privileges.

1 Getting Started

Let's start by installing EPEL repo and updating the system with the latest stable version.

You can do this by running the following command:

2 Install LAMP Server

Before starting, Mantis requires Apache, PHP and MySQL/MariaDB to be installed on your server.

First, install Apache web server by running the following command:

Once Apache is installed, start the Apache service and enable it to start on boot with the following command:

Next, install MariaDB server with the following command:

Next, start MariaDB service and enable it to start on boot with the following command:

Mantis supports PHP greater than 5.5, here we will install PHP version 7.

By default, PHP 7 is not available in CentOS repository, so you will need to install Webtatic repository first.

You can install it with the following command:

Next, run the following command to install PHP7 with all required modules:

Once PHP7 is installed, check the version of the PHP with the following command:

You should see the following output:

Configure Database for Mantis

By 3 default MariaDB installation is not secured, so you will need to secure MariaDB first. You can secure it by running mysql_secure_installation script.

Answer all the questions as shown below:

Next, login to MariaDB shell and create a database and user for Mantis:

Enter your root password and press Enter, then create a database and user with the following command:

Next, grant privileges to the Mantis database with the following command:

Next, you will need to run the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command so that the privileges table will be reloaded by MySQL and we can use new credential:

Next, exit from the MariaDB console with the following command:

After configuring the database, you can proceed to download Mantis.

4 Install Mantis

First, download the latest stable version of the Mantis from sourceforge website. You can download it using the wget command:

Once the download is complete, extract the downloaded file to the apache web root directory with the following command:

Next, change the ownership of the mantis directory with the following command:

Next, you will need to create an apache virtual host file for Mantis. You can do this by creating mantis.conf file inside /etc/httpd/conf.d/directory:

Add the following lines:

Save and close the file, then restart the Apache web server using the following command.

5 Access Mantis Web Interface

Before accessing Cerb web interface, you will need to allow HTTP traffic on port 80 through the system firewalld.

You can do this by running the following command:

Now open your web browser and type the URL http://yourdomain.com, you should see the following page:

Here, provide all necessary details like Database Name, Username, Password, Admin username and Password. Then click on the 'Install/Upgrade' Database button. Once the installation is completed, you should see the following page:

Next, click on the 'Continue' button, you should see the mantis login page:

Here, provide username as 'administrator' and password as 'root', then click on 'Login' button, you should see the Mantis default dashboard in following image:

Congratulations! you have successfully installed Mantis Bug Tracker on CentOS 7 server.