Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7

[scottalanmiller]

osTicket is a popular open source, fully free ticketing and helpdesk system and can easily be installed on CentOS 7. We will be starting with a basic CentOS 7 image. Very few additional packages will be required, but because what is required and/or recommended is often from the EPEL, we will install that as well.

We can be pretty light on the resources here as this is a very light weight web application. Unless you have a huge number of users you will likely be able to operate just fine even with only 512MB of RAM and a single vCPU. We are being generous with 768MB in this example.

Because it is easy to move your installation, add SSL, etc. in this example I am only going to install to a default directory and expose through HTTP on Port 80. Switching to SSL is standard for Apache and need not be covered uniquely here.

yum -y install epel-release
yum -y install firewalld mariadb mariadb-server httpd php unzip php-mysql php-imap php-xml php-mbstring php-pecl-apcu php-pecl-zendopcache php-intl php-gd 
systemctl start firewalld
systemctl enable firewalld
systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=443/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

You will need to manually download the latest osTicket release. In this example I am working with osTicket 1.10. You can download from the osTicket Download Page. Save the resulting zip file into /tmp. In our example we are going to call the ticket system "helpdesk" and we will be able to navigate to it by appending /helpdesk to the IP address of our server. You can name this whatever you like, helpdesk is simply a common option.

cd /tmp
unzip osTicket-v1.10.zip
cp -rp upload /var/www/html/helpdesk
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/html/helpdesk
cd /var/www/html/helpdesk
cp include/ost-sampleconfig.php include/ost-config.php
chmod 0666 include/ost-config.php

At this point if you navigate to http://ipaddress/helpdesk you should see this:

All should be well with green checkmarks everywhere. You can click to continue and if we have done everything correctly above we expect to be brought to the configuration screen like so:

At this point we need to fill in our database information at the bottom of this form. But we have not set up our database yet so we need to do that. We can do that while sitting on this configuration screen to make it easy to copy our data from one place to the other.

systemctl start mariadb
systemctl enable mariadb
mysql_secure_installation

As always with MariaDB and MySQL, the secure installation script will step you through securing your database installation. Just follow the prompts. Other than setting the new root password, you can simply accept all defaults. This is quick and easy. Be sure to record your new, secure root password somewhere.

Now we can create the database and database user that we will use for osTicket.

mysql -uroot -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE ost;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ost.* TO "ostusr"@"localhost" IDENTIFIED BY "password";
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit

Now we can submit our osTicket installation form and continue. This should complete our basic install. Now to lock down one last file.

chmod 0644 include/ost-config.php
rm -rf setup/

How you can navigate to your new ticket system URL and sign in.

[gjacobse]

Can you import a csv file?

[JaredBusch]

@gjacobse said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

Can you import a csv file?

Of what?

[ntozier]

@gjacobse
Of users? Yes.
Go to Agent panel -> Users -> Click Import.

[ntozier]

@scottalanmiller as a side note, one of the most reported issues with osTicket under CentOS is that SELinux has some rules that conflict with some of the AJAX requests. If you get a white bar or find that something doesn't work you would want to check your logs to see if that's whats happening.

[scottalanmiller]

@ntozier said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@scottalanmiller as a side note, one of the most reported issues with osTicket under CentOS is that SELinux has some rules that conflict with some of the AJAX requests. If you get a white bar or find that something doesn't work you would want to check your logs to see if that's whats happening.

Thanks for the tip. I've not seen anything with CentOS 7 yet.

[scottalanmiller]

@ntozier said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@gjacobse
Of users? Yes.
Go to Agent panel -> Users -> Click Import.

He's actually being super obtuse and actually wanted to ask if you specifically had an importer script for Spiceworks tickets. It's a very specific and very complex task, I'm afraid.

[ntozier]

@scottalanmiller said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

He's actually being super obtuse and actually wanted to ask if you specifically had an importer script for Spiceworks tickets. It's a very specific and very complex task, I'm afraid.

The folks over on the paid side (Customization Services) might have the ability to do something like that. But I certainly do not have a script like that, and it is definitely not baked into the product. I'm sure that it is something that they could work with people to do though.

[dafyre]

@scottalanmiller said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@ntozier said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@scottalanmiller as a side note, one of the most reported issues with osTicket under CentOS is that SELinux has some rules that conflict with some of the AJAX requests. If you get a white bar or find that something doesn't work you would want to check your logs to see if that's whats happening.

Thanks for the tip. I've not seen anything with CentOS 7 yet.

I ran into it following your guys to get this installed... I had to

chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t /var/www/html/helpdesk -R

To get it to make it past the setup where it was checking to see if the config file was writeable.

[gjacobse]

@ntozier said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@gjacobse
Of users? Yes.
Go to Agent panel -> Users -> Click Import.

I should have been more specific - I do see that you can import Users - But what about tickets from another system?

We have about a thousand tickets and history which would be nice to have online and searchable.

[scottalanmiller]

@gjacobse said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@ntozier said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@gjacobse
Of users? Yes.
Go to Agent panel -> Users -> Click Import.

I should have been more specific - I do see that you can import Users - But what about tickets from another system?

We have about a thousand tickets and history which would be nice to have online and searchable.

"Another system" is, again, not at all useful. Each "system" is totally unique. If that other system saved in osTicket's format, importing would be trivial. But the assumption is that it does not. So the format that it uses is what matters. This is not a question that can be asked generically.

[dafyre]

It can be done, but it is not trivial. I've done similar conversions from another system to SW.

[scottalanmiller]

@dafyre said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

It can be done, but it is not trivial. I've done similar conversions from another system to SW.

Definitely can be done. Custom script is going to be required.

[dafyre]

@scottalanmiller Or you could just keep the old system around for archival and research.

[Dashrender]

@scottalanmiller said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@dafyre said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

It can be done, but it is not trivial. I've done similar conversions from another system to SW.

Definitely can be done. Custom script is going to be required.

Would the same script be usable by anyone converting from SpiceWorks to osTicket?

[dafyre]

@Dashrender said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@dafyre said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

It can be done, but it is not trivial. I've done similar conversions from another system to SW.

Definitely can be done. Custom script is going to be required.

Would the same script be usable by anyone converting from SpiceWorks to osTicket?

It depends on who writes the script. Because some folks in Spiceworks use Custom Fields to death, lol. That would make it that much harder to accurately transfer the data over.

If somebody can share their Spiceworks DB, I could come up with something... Just make an admin account and pass me the backup copy.

[scottalanmiller]

@Dashrender said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@scottalanmiller said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

@dafyre said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

It can be done, but it is not trivial. I've done similar conversions from another system to SW.

Definitely can be done. Custom script is going to be required.

Would the same script be usable by anyone converting from SpiceWorks to osTicket?

It would be generic, of course. All osTicket and SW databases are the same as each other respectively.

[hobbit666]

Got my eval VM running. Thanks for the guide @scottalanmiller and @dafyre for the extra command to get it going

Quick question if this VM is only going to run osTickets why not just place it in the www root instead of a subfolder like helpdesk or tickets etc.

[DustinB3403]

@hobbit666 said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

Got my eval VM running. Thanks for the guide @scottalanmiller and @dafyre for the extra command to get it going

Quick question if this VM is only going to run osTickets why not just place it in the www root instead of a subfolder like helpdesk or tickets etc.

Because it's proper convention to give each website it's own folder. Using WWW is poor practice.

[scottalanmiller]

@hobbit666 said in Installing osTicket 1.10 on CentOS 7:

Got my eval VM running. Thanks for the guide @scottalanmiller and @dafyre for the extra command to get it going

Quick question if this VM is only going to run osTickets why not just place it in the www root instead of a subfolder like helpdesk or tickets etc.

You can if you want, but that's messy. Why not just point your web server to the right place