OTRS is a free and open source ticketing tool available for Linux like operating systems. OTRS stands for “Open Source Trouble Ticket System“. In opensource world it is one of the most popular trouble ticketing tool used by help desk, call centers and IT service management team in various organizations.
In this article we will demonstrate how to install and configure OTRS 6 (Community Edition) on a CentOS 7 & RHEL 7 System. To Install OTRS community edition on a Linux system we need one database server (MariaDB, MySQL & PostgreSQL), Web Server (Apache & Ngnix) and Perl modules.
Following are the recommended hardware and software requirements for OTRS 6
- 8 GB RAM
- 3 GHZ Xenon
- 256 GB Disk space
- Perl 5.16 or higher
- Web Server (Apache 2 or NGINX)
- Database (MariaDB, MySQL & PostgreSQL 9.2 or higher)
Details of my lab setup for OTRS 6
- Minimal CentOS 7 Or RHEL 7 System
- Hostname: otrs.linuxtechi.lan
- IP Address: 192.168.1.30
- RAM: 4 GB
- vCPU: 2
- Disk Space: 40 GB
Let’s jump into the OTRS 6 installations steps,
Step:1) Apply all system updates and reboot the system
Login to your CentOS 7 or RHEL 7 system and execute the beneath yum update command to apply all the system updates and then reboot it,
[root@otrs ~]# yum update && reboot
Note: Put SELinux in permissive mode, even OTRS official web site suggests to disable SELinux, execute the below command.
[root@otrs ~]# setenforce 0 [root@otrs ~]# sed -i --follow-symlinks 's/SELINUX=enforcing/SELINUX=permissive/g' /etc/sysconfig/selinux
Step:2) Install Web Server (Apache) and Database Server (MariaDB)
Install Apache Web Server and MariaDB database server using the beneath yum command,
[root@otrs ~]# yum install httpd httpd-devel gcc mariadb-server -y
Start and enable the Apache Web service using below commands,
[root@otrs ~]# systemctl start httpd [root@otrs ~]# systemctl enable httpd Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/httpd.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/httpd.service. [root@otrs ~]#
Update the following parameters under the [mysqld] directive in /etc/my.cnf file for OTRS
[root@otrs ~]# vi /etc/my.cnf [mysqld] datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock max_allowed_packet=64M query_cache_size=32M innodb_log_file_size=256M character-set-server=utf8 collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci
Save & exit the file
Start and enable the database (mysql) service using the beneath systemctl commands,
[root@otrs ~]# systemctl start mariadb [root@otrs ~]# systemctl enable mariadb Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/mariadb.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/mariadb.service. [root@otrs ~]#
Configure the root password of mariadb database, remove the test database, remove anonymous users and disable root login remotely.
Run “mysql_secure_installation” command to accomplish above said tasks
[root@otrs ~]# mysql_secure_installation
Output of above command should be something like below,
Step:3) Install Community Edition OTRS 6 using yum command
At time of writing of this article community edition of OTRS 6 is available, use the below yum command to install it from command line.
[root@otrs ~]# yum install https://ftp.otrs.org/pub/otrs/RPMS/rhel/7/otrs-6.0.17-01.noarch.rpm -y
Above command will also install the dependencies of OTRS 6 automatically,
Once the OTRS 6 package is installed successfully then restart apache web service,
[root@otrs ~]# systemctl restart httpd [root@otrs ~]#
Step:4) Allow http & https ports in OS firewall
In case OS firewall is running and enabled on your system then execute the following firewall-cmd command to allow http (80) and https (443) port, else you can skip this step.
[root@otrs ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=http success [root@otrs ~]# firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=https success [root@otrs ~]# firewall-cmd --reload success [root@otrs ~]#
Step:5) Verify and install required perl modules for OTRS
OTRS to work properly, perl modules are required, to verify whether all required perl modules are installed or not run the below command
[root@otrs ~]# /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl
Output of above command would be something like below,
As we can see above there are number of perl modules which are not installed. So to proceed with installation first install the missing perl modules.
Some of the perl modules are not available in the default yum centos 7 / RHEL 7 repositories, so enable the epel repository using following yum command,
[root@otrs ~]# yum install epel-release -y
Now install the missing perl modules using the following yum command,
[root@otrs ~]# yum install "perl(Crypt::Eksblowfish::Bcrypt)" "perl(DBD::Pg)" "perl(Encode::HanExtra)" "perl(JSON::XS)" "perl(Mail::IMAPClient)" "perl(Authen::NTLM)" "perl(ModPerl::Util)" "perl(Text::CSV_XS)" "perl(YAML::XS)" -y
Re-run the command “/opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl” to verify whether all the required perl modules are installed successfully or not.
[root@otrs ~]# /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl
Step:5) Access OTRS 6 Web Installer GUI
Type the following URL in your web browser
http://<OTRS-Server-IP-Adrress>/otrs/installer.pl
In my case URL is “http://192.168.1.30/otrs/installer.pl”
Click on Next …
In the Next Window, Accept the License
In the Next Step select the database you want to use for OTRS, so in my case I am selecting as “MySQL” and select option to create a new database for OTRS and then click on Next…
In the next window specify the root password of mariadb database server, host where mariadb is running and rest of the things installer will automatically pick like OTRS database name, user name and its password.
Click on Next to proceed further,
As we can see above, Installer has successfully setup Database for OTRS, Click on Next…
Specify the FQDN of your OTRS server, admin email address, Organization and Choose “No” against CheckMXRecord option in case your domain don’t have MX record .
In the next window SKIP mail configuration, In case you have already configured MTA or SMTP relay server then specify the details else skip
In Next window you will get message that OTRS has been installed successfully, OTRS Start Page URL, user name and its password.
Step:6) Access Your OTRS Startup page
Now it’s time to access your otrs startup page, type the following URL in your web browser. Use the user name as “root@localhost” and password which is displayed in above step.
http://192.168.1.30/otrs/index.pl
Replace the IP address that suits to your environment.
As we can see on the dashboard OTRS daemon is not running, so let’s start it using otrs user,
[root@otrs ~]# su - otrs [otrs@otrs ~]$ /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.Daemon.pl start Manage the OTRS daemon process. Daemon started [otrs@otrs ~]$ /opt/otrs/bin/Cron.sh start (using /opt/otrs) done [otrs@otrs ~]$
Now refresh the page, “OTRS daemon not running” message should go away.
This confirm that Community Edition OTRS 6 has been installed successfully, that’s all from this article, please do share your feedback and comments in the comments sections below.