In this tutorial, we will show you how to install osTicket on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, os-Ticket is a widely used and trusted open-source support ticket system. It seamlessly routes inquiries created via email, web forms, and phone calls into a simple, easy-to-use, multi-user, web-based customer support platform. Generally Used for Help Desk services.
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 the step-by-step installation osTicket open-source support ticket system on an Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Install osTicket on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install all required PHP modules:
apt-get install php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xmlrpc php7.0-gd
Step 3. Installing osTicket.
Download the latest stable version of osTicket, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.10.1:
sudo mkdir /var/www/html/osticket cd /var/www/html/osticket wget http://osticket.com/sites/default/files/download/osTicket-v1.10.1.zip sudo unzip osTicket-v1.10.1.zip
Next, copy the sample config file:
cp upload/include/ost-sampleconfig.php upload/include/ost-config.php
We will need to change some folders permissions:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/osticket
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:
CREATE DATABASE osticket; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON osticket.* TO 'osticketuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; exit;
Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for osTicket.
Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘osticket.conf’ on your virtual server:
sudo a2enmod rewrite touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/osticket.conf nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin admin@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /var/www/html/osticket/upload/ ServerName your-domain.com ServerAlias www.your-domain.com <Directory /var/www/html/osticket/upload> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common </VirtualHost>
Now, we can restart the Apache webserver so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service
Step 6. Accessing osTicket.
osTicket will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip and complete the required steps to finish the installation.
Once the installation has been completed, remove the setup directory and change the permission of the osTicket config file:
sudo rm -rf /var/www/html/osticket/upload/setup sudo chmod 0644 /var/www/html/osticket/include/ost-config.php
Congratulations! You have successfully installed osTicket. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the osTicket open-source support ticket system on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official osTicket website.
