Mantis Installation Tutorial - Fedora OS

Version 1.0
Author: Prashanth Kannan

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install and configure Mantis - Defect Tracker on your Fedora operating system. Mantis is an open source free defect tracking utility that is really easy to configure and use. Its installation is also very easy if you follow the steps that I have mentioned below.

Preliminary note

I have already installed Fedora & when I wrote this tutorial the version of Mantis was 1.1.4.

Let's get started

...Start Terminal
Become root:

$ su

Enter Password:

[Root]$ yum update

Wait until the update has finished.

[Root]$ yum install httpd php php-pdo php-mysql php-gd mysql mysql-server

Enable and start services for both the httpd and mysqld.

Go to the /var/www/html location (this is where the fun starts).

cd /var/www/html/

When I wrote this the Mantis version was 1.1.4, it may have changed now (it probably has), but get the latest version of Mantis from Sourceforge:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mantisbt/mantis-1.1.4.tar.gz?modtime=1224375085&big_mirror=0

Untar the tarball:

$ tar xvf mantis-1.1.4.tar.gz

 $chown www-data mantis-1.1.4

Above line gives www-data (or your apache username) access to the mantis-1.1.4 folder.

 Now, in case you don't want to type http://localhost/mantis-1.1.4 , create a redirect in your html directory:

$ gedit index.html

Add this line and save:

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=/mantis-1.1.4/">

Open your favourite browser (hopefully Mozilla) and point to http://localhost, this should open your Mantis installer in your browser (if it does not, you've done something wrong).

Select install as is (please change the password and user name for your root if it is different). 

 If you are getting the error saying that config file could not be written, please do the below steps.

$ gedit /var/www/html/mantis-1.1.4/config_inc.php

Insert the following text:

<?php
	$g_hostname = 'localhost';
	$g_db_type = 'mysql';
	$g_database_name = 'bugtracker';
	$g_db_username = 'root';
	$g_db_password = '';
?>

Your Mantis installation is complete; delete the admin directory in the /var/www/html/mantis-1.1.4 directory:

$ cd /var/www/html/mantis-1.1.4
$ rm -fr admin/

Edit the config_inc.php. Add the following lines to remove the the image verification (it does not work on local server for some reason). Add the settings to send emails via Send mail. Hopefully you have installed this, if not:

$ yum install send-mail

If it is installed:

$ cd /var/www/html/mantis-1.1.4
$ gedit config_inc.php

Add the following the following:

$g_signup_use_captcha = OFF;
$g_phpMailer_method = 1;

SELinux

SELinux may block your sendmail, if so go to System > Administration > SELinux management.

Under Boolean Option, filter Sendmail.

Enable the option httpd_can_sendmail.

Log in to Mantis using http://localdomain.

Log on with:

Username: administrator
Password: root

If you create new account, you should receive an activation email on your email ID.

Thank you!