Bug Trackers

I am the admin for a Ubuntu 9.04 Linode which is used for a web presence, email, and svn repository for a small group of developers and testers. I now need to use the same server to host a ticket-based bug tracking site for the team. I tried bugzilla, but for all my Googling I couldn't find a way to install it and have standard functionality (user account creation!) without sendmail. I have absolutely no desire to set up sendmail because I already have Citadel working well and we are all very pleased with Citadel.

So here's the gist of the post: I need a simple, elegant ticket-based bug tracking system. It doesn't need lots of features. It doesn't even need to email someone when their ticket is responded to. It just needs to provide (over Apache2) a web site which allows the devs and testers to post new bugs, respond to them, and see which ones are still open.

Any ideas? I have considered just installing phpbb and setting up a forum for bugs, but we have no other need for a forum. I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle of setting it up and attempting to make it as secure as possible, and it really isn't well tailored to the needs of bug tracking, anyway.

10 Replies

According to the installation instructions on bugzilla.org it doesn't, necessarily, require sendmail but rather a sendmail-compatible MTA. Citadel, if I'm remembering correctly, uses Postfix for the MTA and Postfix is definitely sendmail-compatible. Perhaps you can use bugzilla after all?

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/htm … nstall-MTA">http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/html/installation.html#install-MTA

-James

@irgeek:

According to the installation instructions on bugzilla.org it doesn't, necessarily, require sendmail but rather a sendmail-compatible MTA. Citadel, if I'm remembering correctly, uses Postfix for the MTA and Postfix is definitely sendmail-compatible. Perhaps you can use bugzilla after all?

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/htm … nstall-MTA">http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/html/installation.html#install-MTA

-James

Citadel uses it's own MTA, fwiw. That being said, it's supposed to be compatible according to their website.: http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/faq:ins … tadel_have">http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/faq:installation:doescitadelhave

I checked to make sure that citadel-mta was installed (it is), and that the symlink for sendmail pointed to the correct bin (/usr/sbin/citmail on ubuntu 9.04). However, I still get the following error when I try to send the account creation email from bugzilla:

There was an error sending mail from 'bugzilla-daemon' to 'cchildress@sturnstudios.com':error when closing pipe to /usr/sbin/sendmail: 

Any idea what might be causing the problem?

@oliver:

FlySpray !

http://flyspray.org

I hear you, and if bugzilla continues to be a pain flyspray will be my next attempt.

@clchildress:

@oliver:

FlySpray !

http://flyspray.org

I hear you, and if bugzilla continues to be a pain flyspray will be my next attempt.

I haven't used it in a while but from what I remember it was a five minute setup and it provided me with all the basic bug tracking features I needed.

Good luck!

@clchildress:

Any ideas? I have considered just installing phpbb and setting up a forum for bugs, but we have no other need for a forum. I'm not sure if it's worth the hassle of setting it up and attempting to make it as secure as possible, and it really isn't well tailored to the needs of bug tracking, anyway.
Give trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) a peek … it's more than just a bug tracker, but you can ignore/disable the wiki portion and not use planning oriented features like milestones if you don't need it. In addition to ticketing, it can tightly cross-reference your SVN repository from tickets, and tickets from SVN commit messages, as well as providing a nice SVN browser.

It's Python based rather than PHP, but it's simple to just let it run its own web server on a local port, and then proxy from your main Apache configuration as needed. Trac's own data is managed in a local sqlite database by default, though it can share a PostgreSQL/MySQL database if desired.

-- David

What about something like ssmtp which basically just provides 'sendmail', and hooks it to external SMTP? You might be able to extract just its sendmail binary, and configure it to talk to Citadel's SMTP…

I run redmine on my slice and it does mail using msmtp and sending through google apps email attached to my domains.

redmine does not require email to work, its a bonus if you want it that way. it can also use openid which is great or just setup user accounts etc. integrates with source repor's of various kinds (git, cvs, svn etc).

redmine rocks for what I use it for.

It looks like with Citadel, /usr/sbin/sendmail is a link to citmail. It may be that Bugzilla is using command-line options that citmail doesn't support. You can diagnose what's going on by saving the following script as /usr/sbin/sendmail:

#!/bin/sh
logger "$0 called with arguments $*"
logger "Text from stdin follows:"
while read a ; do
  logger "$a"
done
logger "End of standard input"
exit 1

Then look in your system logs to see how Bugzilla is calling sendmail.

After writing the above, I found this, which seems to indicate you can simply use SMTP. Assuming Citadel is listening for mail, you can point Bugzilla to send SMTP mail to localhost and it should work fine.

Also it looks like Citadel uses Bugzilla, so maybe ask them the right way to do it. :)

Check out fixx:

http://hedgehoglab.com/products/fixx/

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