In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mantis Bug Tracker on your CentOS 7 server. For those of you who didn’t know, Mantis is a free and popular open-source bug tracking system. It is written in PHP and supports all types of database servers. It provides a professional dashboard to manage bugs assigned to the user. It supports powerful access control which provides per project base user access. It is very flexible, you can customize the issue fields, notifications, and workflow.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Mantis Bug Tracker on a CentOS 7 server.
Install Mantis Bug Tracker on CentOS 7
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Install LAMP server.
A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:
yum -y install php-gd php-imap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-snmp curl curl-devel
Step 3. Installing Mantis Bug Tracker.
The first thing to do is to go to Mantis Bug Tracker’s download page and download the latest stable version of Mantis, At the moment of writing this article it is version 2.5.0:
wget https://ncu.dl.sourceforge.net/project/mantisbt/mantis-stable/2.5.0/mantisbt-2.5.0.zip
Unpack the Nextcloud archive to the document root directory on your server:
tar -xpf mantisbt-2.5.0.tar.gz mv mantisbt-2.4.1 /var/www/html/mantis
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown apache:apache -R /var/www/html/mantis/
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for Mantis Bug Tracker.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. You should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB.
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Mantis Bug Tracker. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Mantis Bug Tracker installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE mantisdb; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mantisdb.* TO 'mantis'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mantispassword'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> \q
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for Mantis Bug Tracker.
We will create an Apache virtual host for your Nextcloud website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf
Next, create the virtual host:
mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/ nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot "/var/www/html/mantis/" ServerName yourdomain.com ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined <Directory "/var/www/html/mantis/"> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effects:
systemctl restart httpd.service systemctl enable httpd.service
Step 6. Accessing Mantis Bug Tracker.
Mantis Bug Tracker will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/mantis/admin/install.php or http://server-ip/mantis/admin/install.php and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Mantis. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Mantis’s free open source bug tracking system on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Mantis Bug Tracker website.
