How To Install osTicket on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install osTicket on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, osTicket offers free, open-source ticket management and customer care solutions for businesses of all sizes, especially small and medium-sized businesses. With osTicket, you can manage, organize, and archive your support requests. It integrates customer support requests received by email, web forms, and phone calls into a simple, easy-to-use, multi-user web-based platform.

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 osTicket on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install osTicket on Debian 11 Bullseye

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing the LAMP stack.

A Debian 11 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, Please read our previous tutorial to install LAMP Server on Debian 11.

Step 3. Installing osTicket on Debian 11.

By default, osTicket is not available on Debian’s base repository.  Now we download the latest osTicket installation archive from GitHub using wget command:

wget https://github.com/osTicket/osTicket/releases/download/v1.15.4/osTicket-v1.15.4.zip

Next, extract the downloaded file, use the below command:

unzip osTicket-v1.15.4.zip
mv osTicket-1.15.4/* /var/www/html/
sudo cp upload/include/ost-sampleconfig.php upload/include/ost-config.php

We will need to change some folder permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for osTicket.

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 osTicket. 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 osTicket installation:

MariaDB [(none)]> create database osticketdb;
MariaDB [(none)]> create user osticket_user@localhost identified by 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> grant all privileges on osticketdb.* to osticket_user@localhost identified by 'your-strong-password';
MariaDB [(none)]> flush privileges;
MariaDB [(none)]> exit;

Step 5. Configuring Apache.

Now we create a new VirtualHost to better manage the osTicket website:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf

Add the following file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerAdmin admin@your_domain.com
      DocumentRoot /var/www/html/upload
     ServerName your-domain.com

     <Directory /var/www/html/upload/>
          Options FollowSymlinks
          AllowOverride All
          Require all granted
     </Directory>

     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your-domain.com_error.log
     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/your-domain.com_access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Save and close, then restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/osticket.conf
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 6. Installing the Let’s Encrypt certificates.

First, install Certbot to your Debian system using the following command below:

sudo apt install certbot python3-certbot-apache

Then, generate the certificates, with the following command:

sudo certbot --apache -d [your-domain.com]

You will then be prompted to enter an email address for the certificate. After you have entered that you must agree to the T&C’s and decide if you want to share your email address with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This last step is optional. Once successfully, Reload Apache again to load all the new configurations.

Step 7. Configure Firewall.

Now configure UFW to allow SSH (port 22) and HTTP / HTTPS (ports 80, 443):

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow 443/tcp

Step 8. Accessing the osTicket Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open a web browser and go to https://your-domain.com and complete the required steps to finish the installation.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed osTicket. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of osTicket on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official osTicket website.