Administering Bugzilla
Bugzilla Configuration
Bugzilla is configured by changing various parameters, accessed
from the "Edit parameters" link in the page footer. Here are
some of the key parameters on that page. You should run down this
list and set them appropriately after installing Bugzilla.
checklist
maintainer:
The maintainer parameter is the email address of the person
responsible for maintaining this
Bugzilla installation. The address need not be that of a valid Bugzilla
account.
urlbase:
This parameter defines the fully qualified domain name and web
server path to your Bugzilla installation.
For example, if your Bugzilla query page is
http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/query.cgi,
set your urlbase
to http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/.
usebuggroups:
This dictates whether or not to implement group-based security for
Bugzilla. If set, Bugzilla bugs can have an associated 'group',
defining which users are allowed to see and edit the
bug.
Set "usebuggroups" to "on"
only
if you may wish to restrict access to particular bugs to certain
groups of users. I suggest leaving
this parameter off
while initially testing your Bugzilla.
usebuggroupsentry:
Bugzilla Products can have a group associated with them, so that
certain users can only see bugs in certain products. When this parameter
is set to on
, this places all newly-created bugs in the
group for their product immediately.
shadowdb:
You run into an interesting problem when Bugzilla reaches a
high level of continuous activity. MySQL supports only table-level
write locking. What this means is that if someone needs to make a
change to a bug, they will lock the entire table until the operation
is complete. Locking for write also blocks reads until the write is
complete. Note that more recent versions of mysql support row level
locking using different table types. These types are slower than the
standard type, and Bugzilla does not yet take advantage of features
such as transactions which would justify this speed decrease. The
Bugzilla team are, however, happy to hear about any experiences with
row level locking and Bugzilla
The shadowdb
parameter was designed to get around this limitation. While only a
single user is allowed to write to a table at a time, reads can
continue unimpeded on a read-only shadow copy of the database.
Although your database size will double, a shadow database can cause
an enormous performance improvement when implemented on extremely
high-traffic Bugzilla databases.
As a guide, mozilla.org began needing
shadowdb
when they reached around 40,000 Bugzilla users with several hundred
Bugzilla bug changes and comments per day.
The value of the parameter defines the name of the
shadow bug database. You will need to set the host and port settings
from the params page, and set up replication in your database server
so that updates reach this readonly mirror. Consult your database
documentation for more detail.
shutdownhtml:
If you need to shut down Bugzilla to perform administration, enter
some descriptive HTML here and anyone who tries to use Bugzilla will
receive a page to that effect. Obviously, editparams.cgi will
still be accessible so you can remove the HTML and re-enable Bugzilla.
:-)
passwordmail:
Every time a user creates an account, the text of
this parameter (with substitutions) is sent to the new user along with
their password message.
Add any text you wish to the "passwordmail" parameter box. For
instance, many people choose to use this box to give a quick training
blurb about how to use Bugzilla at your site.
movebugs:
This option is an undocumented feature to allow moving bugs
between separate Bugzilla installations. You will need to understand
the source code in order to use this feature. Please consult
movebugs.pl in your Bugzilla source tree for
further documentation, such as it is.
useqacontact:
This allows you to define an email address for each component, in
addition
to that of the default owner, who will be sent carbon copies of
incoming bugs.
usestatuswhiteboard:
This defines whether you wish to have a free-form, overwritable field
associated with each bug. The advantage of the Status Whiteboard is
that it can be deleted or modified with ease, and provides an
easily-searchable field for indexing some bugs that have some trait
in common.
whinedays:
Set this to the number of days you want to let bugs go
in the NEW or REOPENED state before notifying people they have
untouched new bugs. If you do not plan to use this feature, simply do
not set up the whining cron job described in the installation
instructions, or set this value to "0" (never whine).
commenton*:
All these
fields allow you to dictate what changes can pass without comment,
and which must have a comment from the person who changed them.
Often, administrators will allow users to add themselves to the CC
list, accept bugs, or change the Status Whiteboard without adding a
comment as to their reasons for the change, yet require that most
other changes come with an explanation.
Set the "commenton" options according to your site policy. It
is a wise idea to require comments when users resolve, reassign, or
reopen bugs at the very least.
It is generally far better to require a developer comment
when resolving bugs than not. Few things are more annoying to bug
database users than having a developer mark a bug "fixed" without
any comment as to what the fix was (or even that it was truly
fixed!)
supportwatchers:
Turning on this option allows users to ask to receive copies of
all a particular other user's bug email. This is, of
course, subject to the groupset restrictions on the bug; if the
watcher
would not normally be allowed to view a bug, the watcher cannot get
around the system by setting herself up to watch the bugs of someone
with bugs outside her privileges. They would still only receive email
updates for those bugs she could normally view.
User Administration
Creating the Default User
When you first run checksetup.pl after installing Bugzilla, it
will prompt you for the administrative username (email address) and
password for this "super user". If for some reason you delete
the "super user" account, re-running checksetup.pl will again prompt
you for this username and password.
If you wish to add more administrative users, add them to
the "admin" group and, optionally, add edit the tweakparams, editusers,
creategroups, editcomponents, and editkeywords groups to add the
entire admin group to those groups.
Managing Other Users
Creating new users
Your users can create their own user accounts by clicking the
"New Account" link at the bottom of each page (assuming they
aren't logged in as someone else already.) However, should you
desire to create user accounts ahead of time, here is how you do
it.
After logging in, click the "Users" link at the footer of
the query page, and then click "Add a new user".
Fill out the form presented. This page is self-explanatory.
When done, click "Submit".
Adding a user this way will
not
send an email informing them of their username and password.
While useful for creating dummy accounts (watchers which
shuttle mail to another system, for instance, or email
addresses which are a mailing list), in general it is
preferable to log out and use the
New Account
button to create users, as it will pre-populate all the
required fields and also notify the user of her account name
and password.
Modifying Users
To see a specific user, search for their login name
in the box provided on the "Edit Users" page. To see all users,
leave the box blank.
You can search in different ways the listbox to the right
of the text entry box. You can match by
case-insensitive substring (the default),
regular expression, or a
reverse
regular expression match, which finds every user name which does NOT
match the regular expression. (Please see
the man regexp
manual page for details on regular expression syntax.)
Once you have found your user, you can change the following
fields:
Login Name:
This is generally the user's full email address. However, if you
have are using the emailsuffix Param, this may just be the user's
login name. Note that users can now change their login names
themselves (to any valid email address.)
Real Name: The user's real name. Note that
Bugzilla does not require this to create an account.
Password:
You can change the user's password here. Users can automatically
request a new password, so you shouldn't need to do this often.
If you want to disable an account, see Disable Text below.
Disable Text:
If you type anything in this box, including just a space, the
user is prevented from logging in, or making any changes to
bugs via the web interface.
The HTML you type in this box is presented to the user when
they attempt to perform these actions, and should explain
why the account was disabled.
Don't disable the administrator account!
The user can still submit bugs via
the e-mail gateway, if you set it up, even if the disabled text
field is filled in. The e-mail gateway should
not
be enabled for secure installations of Bugzilla.
<groupname>:
If you have created some groups, e.g. "securitysensitive", then
checkboxes will appear here to allow you to add users to, or
remove them from, these groups.
canconfirm:
This field is only used if you have enabled the "unconfirmed"
status. If you enable this for a user,
that user can then move bugs from "Unconfirmed" to a "Confirmed"
status (e.g.: "New" status).
creategroups:
This option will allow a user to create and destroy groups in
Bugzilla.
editbugs:
Unless a user has this bit set, they can only edit those bugs
for which they are the assignee or the reporter. Even if this
option is unchecked, users can still add comments to bugs.
editcomponents:
This flag allows a user to create new products and components,
as well as modify and destroy those that have no bugs associated
with them. If a product or component has bugs associated with it,
those bugs must be moved to a different product or component
before Bugzilla will allow them to be destroyed.
editkeywords:
If you use Bugzilla's keyword functionality, enabling this
feature allows a user to create and destroy keywords. As always,
the keywords for existing bugs containing the keyword the user
wishes to destroy must be changed before Bugzilla will allow it
to die.
editusers:
This flag allows a user to do what you're doing right now: edit
other users. This will allow those with the right to do so to
remove administrator privileges from other users or grant them to
themselves. Enable with care.
tweakparams:
This flag allows a user to change Bugzilla's Params
(using editparams.cgi.)
<productname>:
This allows an administrator to specify the products in which
a user can see bugs. The user must still have the
"editbugs" privilege to edit bugs in these products.
Product, Component, Milestone, and Version Administration
Products
Products
are the broadest category in Bugzilla, and tend to represent real-world
shipping products. E.g. if your company makes computer games,
you should have one product per game, perhaps a "Common" product for
units of technology used in multiple games, and maybe a few special
products (Website, Administration...)
Many of Bugzilla's settings are configurable on a per-product
basis. The number of "votes" available to users is set per-product,
as is the number of votes
required to move a bug automatically from the UNCONFIRMED status to the
NEW status.
To create a new product:
Select "products" from the footer
Select the "Add" link in the bottom right
Enter the name of the product and a description. The
Description field may contain HTML.
Don't worry about the "Closed for bug entry", "Maximum Votes
per person", "Maximum votes a person can put on a single bug",
"Number of votes a bug in this Product needs to automatically get out
of the UNCOMFIRMED state", and "Version" options yet. We'll cover
those in a few moments.
Components
Components are subsections of a Product. E.g. the computer game
you are designing may have a "UI"
component, an "API" component, a "Sound System" component, and a
"Plugins" component, each overseen by a different programmer. It
often makes sense to divide Components in Bugzilla according to the
natural divisions of responsibility within your Product or
company.
Each component has a owner and (if you turned it on in the parameters),
a QA Contact. The owner should be the primary person who fixes bugs in
that component. The QA Contact should be the person who will ensure
these bugs are completely fixed. The Owner, QA Contact, and Reporter
will get email when new bugs are created in this Component and when
these bugs change. Default Owner and Default QA Contact fields only
dictate the
default assignments;
these can be changed on bug submission, or at any later point in
a bug's life.
To create a new Component:
Select the "Edit components" link from the "Edit product"
page
Select the "Add" link in the bottom right.
Fill out the "Component" field, a short "Description",
the "Initial Owner" and "Initial QA Contact" (if enabled.)
The Component and Description fields may contain HTML;
the "Initial Owner" field must be a login name
already existing in the database.
Versions
Versions are the revisions of the product, such as "Flinders
3.1", "Flinders 95", and "Flinders 2000". Version is not a multi-select
field; the usual practice is to select the most recent version with
the bug.
To create and edit Versions:
From the "Edit product" screen, select "Edit Versions"
You will notice that the product already has the default
version "undefined". Click the "Add" link in the bottom right.
Enter the name of the Version. This field takes text only.
Then click the "Add" button.
Milestones
Milestones are "targets" that you plan to get a bug fixed by. For
example, you have a bug that you plan to fix for your 3.0 release, it
would be assigned the milestone of 3.0.
Milestone options will only appear for a Product if you turned
on the "usetargetmilestone" Param in the "Edit Parameters" screen.
To create new Milestones, set Default Milestones, and set
Milestone URL:
Select "Edit milestones" from the "Edit product" page.
Select "Add" in the bottom right corner.
text
Enter the name of the Milestone in the "Milestone" field. You
can optionally set the "sortkey", which is a positive or negative
number (-255 to 255) that defines where in the list this particular
milestone appears. This is because milestones often do not
occur in alphanumeric order For example, "Future" might be
after "Release 1.2". Select "Add".
From the Edit product screen, you can enter the URL of a
page which gives information about your milestones and what
they mean.
If you want your milestone document to be restricted so
that it can only be viewed by people in a particular Bugzilla
group, the best way is to attach the document to a bug in that
group, and make the URL the URL of that attachment.
Voting
Voting allows users to be given a pot of votes which they can allocate
to bugs, to indicate that they'd like them fixed.
This allows developers to gauge
user need for a particular enhancement or bugfix. By allowing bugs with
a certain number of votes to automatically move from "UNCONFIRMED" to
"NEW", users of the bug system can help high-priority bugs garner
attention so they don't sit for a long time awaiting triage.
To modify Voting settings:
Navigate to the "Edit product" screen for the Product you
wish to modify
Maximum Votes per person:
Setting this field to "0" disables voting.
Maximum Votes a person can put on a single
bug":
It should probably be some number lower than the
"Maximum votes per person". Don't set this field to "0" if
"Maximum votes per person" is non-zero; that doesn't make
any sense.
Number of votes a bug in this product needs to
automatically get out of the UNCONFIRMED state:
Setting this field to "0" disables the automatic move of
bugs from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
Once you have adjusted the values to your preference, click
"Update".
Groups and Group Security
Groups allow the administrator
to isolate bugs or products that should only be seen by certain people.
There are two types of group - Generic Groups, and Product-Based Groups.
Product-Based Groups are matched with products, and allow you to restrict
access to bugs on a per-product basis. They are enabled using the
usebuggroups Param. Turning on the usebuggroupsentry
Param will mean bugs automatically get added to their product group when
filed.
Generic Groups have no special relationship to products;
you create them, and put bugs in them
as required. One example of the use of Generic Groups
is Mozilla's "Security" group,
into which security-sensitive bugs are placed until fixed. Only the
Mozilla Security Team are members of this group.
To create Generic Groups:
Select the "groups"
link in the footer.
Take a moment to understand the instructions on the "Edit
Groups" screen, then select the "Add Group" link.
Fill out the "Group", "Description", and
"User RegExp" fields. "New User RegExp" allows you to automatically
place all users who fulfill the Regular Expression into the new group.
When you have finished, click "Add".
The User Regexp is a perl regexp and, if not anchored, will match
any part of an address. So, if you do not want to grant access
into 'mycompany.com' to 'badperson@mycompany.com.hacker.net', use
'@mycompany\.com$' as the regexp.
After you add your new group, edit the new group. On the
edit page, you can specify other groups that should be included
in this group and which groups should be permitted to add and delete
users from this group.
To use Product-Based Groups:
Turn on "usebuggroups" and "usebuggroupsentry" in the "Edit
Parameters" screen.
In future, when you create a Product, a matching group will be
automatically created. If you need to add a Product Group to
a Product which was created before you turned on usebuggroups,
then simply create a new group, as outlined above, with the
same name as the Product.
Note that group permissions are such that you need to be a member
of all the groups a bug is in, for whatever
reason, to see that bug.
Bugzilla Security
Poorly-configured MySQL and Bugzilla installations have
given attackers full access to systems in the past. Please take these
guidelines seriously, even for Bugzilla machines hidden away behind
your firewall. 80% of all computer trespassers are insiders, not
anonymous crackers.
These instructions must, of necessity, be somewhat vague since
Bugzilla runs on so many different platforms. If you have refinements
of these directions for specific platforms, please submit them to
mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org
To secure your installation:
Ensure you are running at least MysQL version 3.22.32 or newer.
Earlier versions had notable security holes and (from a security
point of view) poor default configuration choices.
There is no substitute for understanding the tools on your
system!
Read
The MySQL Privilege System
until you can recite it from memory!
Lock down /etc/inetd.conf. Heck, disable inet entirely on this
box. It should only listen to port 25 for Sendmail and port 80 for
Apache.
Do not run Apache as
nobody
. This will require very lax permissions in your Bugzilla
directories. Run it, instead, as a user with a name, set via your
httpd.conf file.
nobody
is a real user on UNIX systems. Having a process run as user id
nobody
is absolutely no protection against system crackers versus using
any other user account. As a general security measure, I recommend
you create unique user ID's for each daemon running on your system
and, if possible, use "chroot" to jail that process away from the
rest of your system.
Ensure you have adequate access controls for the
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ directory, as well as the
$BUGZILLA_HOME/localconfig file.
The localconfig file stores your "bugs" database account password.
In addition, some
files under $BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ store sensitive information.
Bugzilla provides default .htaccess files to protect the most
common Apache installations. However, you should verify these are
adequate according to the site-wide security policy of your web
server, and ensure that the .htaccess files are allowed to
"override" default permissions set in your Apache configuration
files. Covering Apache security is beyond the scope of this Guide;
please consult the Apache documentation for details.
If you are using a web server that does not support the
.htaccess control method,
you are at risk!
After installing, check to see if you can view the file
"localconfig" in your web browser (e.g.:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/localconfig
). If you can read the contents of this file, your web server has
not secured your bugzilla directory properly and you must fix this
problem before deploying Bugzilla. If, however, it gives you a
"Forbidden" error, then it probably respects the .htaccess
conventions and you are good to go.
When you run checksetup.pl, the script will attempt to modify
various permissions on files which Bugzilla uses. If you do not have
a webservergroup set in the localconfig file, then Bugzilla will have
to make certain files world readable and/or writable.
THIS IS INSECURE!
. This means that anyone who can get access to your system can do
whatever they want to your Bugzilla installation.
This also means that if your webserver runs all cgi scripts
as the same user/group, anyone on the system who can run cgi
scripts will be able to take control of your Bugzilla
installation.
On Apache, you can use .htaccess files to protect access to
these directories, as outlined in
Bug
57161
for the localconfig file, and
Bug
65572
for adequate protection in your data/ directory.
Note the instructions which follow are Apache-specific. If you
use IIS, Netscape, or other non-Apache web servers, please consult
your system documentation for how to secure these files from being
transmitted to curious users.
Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess",
readable by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/data directory.
<Files comments> allow from all </Files>
deny from all
Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess",
readable by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/ directory.
<Files localconfig> deny from all </Files>
allow from all
Template Customisation
One of the large changes for 2.16 was the templatisation of the
entire user-facing UI, using the
Template Toolkit.
Administrators can now configure the look and feel of Bugzilla without
having to edit Perl files or face the nightmare of massive merge
conflicts when they upgrade to a newer version in the future.
Templatisation also makes localised versions of Bugzilla possible,
for the first time. In the future, a Bugzilla installation may
have templates installed for multiple localisations, and select
which ones to use based on the user's browser language setting.
What to Edit
There are two different ways of editing of Bugzilla's templates,
and which you use depends mainly on how you upgrade Bugzilla. The
template directory structure is that there's a top level directory,
template, which contains a directory for
each installed localisation. The default English templates are
therefore in en. Underneath that, there
is the default directory and optionally the
custom directory. The default
directory contains all the templates shipped with Bugzilla, whereas
the custom directory does not exist at first and
must be created if you want to use it.
The first method of making customisations is to directly edit the
templates in template/en/default. This is
probably the best method for small changes if you are going to use
the CVS method of upgrading, because if you then execute a
cvs update, any template fixes will get
automagically merged into your modified versions.
If you use this method, your installation will break if CVS conflicts
occur.
The other method is to copy the templates into a mirrored directory
structure under template/en/custom. The templates
in this directory automatically override those in default.
This is the technique you
need to use if you use the overwriting method of upgrade, because
otherwise your changes will be lost. This method is also better if
you are using the CVS method of upgrading and are going to make major
changes, because it is guaranteed that the contents of this directory
will not be touched during an upgrade, and you can then decide whether
to continue using your own templates, or make the effort to merge your
changes into the new versions by hand.
If you use this method, your installation may break if incompatible
changes are made to the template interface. If such changes are made
they will be documented in the release notes, provided you are using a
stable release of Bugzilla. If you use using unstable code, you will
need to deal with this one yourself, although if possible the changes
will be mentioned before they occur in the deprecations section of the
previous stable release's release notes.
Don't directly edit the compiled templates in
data/template/* - your
changes will be lost when Template Toolkit recompiles them.
How To Edit Templates
The syntax of the Template Toolkit language is beyond the scope of
this guide. It's reasonably easy to pick up by looking at the current
templates; or, you can read the manual, available on the
Template Toolkit home
page. However, you should particularly remember (for security
reasons) to always HTML filter things which come from the database or
user input, to prevent cross-site scripting attacks.
However, one thing you should take particular care about is the need
to properly HTML filter data that has been passed into the template.
This means that if the data can possibly contain special HTML characters
such as <, and the data was not intended to be HTML, they need to be
converted to entity form, ie <. You use the 'html' filter in the
Template Toolkit to do this. If you fail to do this, you may open up
your installation to cross-site scripting attacks.
Also note that Bugzilla adds a few filters of its own, that are not
in standard Template Toolkit. In particular, the 'url_quote' filter
can convert characters that are illegal or have special meaning in URLs,
such as &, to the encoded form, ie %26. This actually encodes most
characters (but not the common ones such as letters and numbers and so
on), including the HTML-special characters, so there's never a need to
HTML filter afterwards.
Editing templates is a good way of doing a "poor man's custom fields".
For example, if you don't use the Status Whiteboard, but want to have
a free-form text entry box for "Build Identifier", then you can just
edit the templates to change the field labels. It's still be called
status_whiteboard internally, but your users don't need to know that.
If you are making template changes that you intend on submitting back
for inclusion in standard Bugzilla, you should read the relevant
sections of the
Developers'
Guide.
Template Formats
Some CGIs have the ability to use more than one template. For
example, buglist.cgi can output bug lists as RDF or two
different forms of HTML (complex and simple). (Try this out
by appending &format=simple to a buglist.cgi
URL on your Bugzilla installation.) This
mechanism, called template 'formats', is extensible.
To see if a CGI supports multiple output formats, grep the
CGI for "ValidateOutputFormat". If it's not present, adding
multiple format support isn't too hard - see how it's done in
other CGIs.
To make a new format template for a CGI which supports this,
open a current template for
that CGI and take note of the INTERFACE comment (if present.) This
comment defines what variables are passed into this template. If
there isn't one, I'm afraid you'll have to read the template and
the code to find out what information you get.
Write your template in whatever markup or text style is appropriate.
You now need to decide what content type you want your template
served as. Open up the localconfig file and find the
$contenttypes
variable. If your content type is not there, add it. Remember
the three- or four-letter tag assigned to you content type.
This tag will be part of the template filename.
Save the template as <stubname>-<formatname>.<contenttypetag>.tmpl.
Try out the template by calling the CGI as
<cginame>.cgi?format=<formatname> .
Particular Templates
There are a few templates you may be particularly interested in
customising for your installation.
index.html.tmpl:
This is the Bugzilla front page.
global/header.html.tmpl:
This defines the header that goes on all Bugzilla pages.
The header includes the banner, which is what appears to users
and is probably what you want to edit instead. However the
header also includes the HTML HEAD section, so you could for
example add a stylesheet or META tag by editing the header.
global/banner.html.tmpl:
This contains the "banner", the part of the header that appears
at the top of all Bugzilla pages. The default banner is reasonably
barren, so you'll probably want to customise this to give your
installation a distinctive look and feel. It is recommended you
preserve the Bugzilla version number in some form so the version
you are running can be determined, and users know what docs to read.
global/footer.html.tmpl:
This defines the footer that goes on all Bugzilla pages. Editing
this is another way to quickly get a distinctive look and feel for
your Bugzilla installation.
bug/create/user-message.html.tmpl:
This is a message that appears near the top of the bug reporting page.
By modifying this, you can tell your users how they should report
bugs.
bug/process/midair.html.tmpl:
This is the page used if two people submit simultaneous changes to the
same bug. The second person to submit their changes will get this page
to tell them what the first person did, and ask if they wish to
overwrite those changes or go back and revisit the bug. The default
title and header on this page read "Mid-air collision detected!" If
you work in the aviation industry, or other environment where this
might be found offensive (yes, we have true stories of this happening)
you'll want to change this to something more appropriate for your
environment.
bug/create/create.html.tmpl and
bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl:
You may wish to get bug submitters to give certain bits of structured
information, each in a separate input widget, for which there is not a
field in the database. The bug entry system has been designed in an
extensible fashion to enable you to define arbitrary fields and widgets,
and have their values appear formatted in the initial
Description, rather than in database fields. An example of this
is the mozilla.org
guided
bug submission form.
To make this work, create a custom template for
enter_bug.cgi (the default template, on which you
could base it, is create.html.tmpl),
and either call it create.html.tmpl or use a format and
call it create-<formatname>.html.tmpl.
Put it in the custom/bug/create
directory. In it, add widgets for each piece of information you'd like
collected - such as a build number, or set of steps to reproduce.
Then, create a template like
custom/bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl, also named
after your format if you are using one, which
references the form fields you have created. When a bug report is
submitted, the initial comment attached to the bug report will be
formatted according to the layout of this template.
For example, if your enter_bug template had a field
<input type="text" name="buildid" size="30">
and then your comment.txt.tmpl had
BuildID: [% form.buildid %]
then
BuildID: 20020303
would appear in the initial checkin comment.
Change Permission Customisation
This feature should be considered experimental; the Bugzilla code you
will be changing is not stable, and could change or move between
versions. Be aware that if you make modifications to it, you may have
to re-make them or port them if Bugzilla changes internally between
versions.
Companies often have rules about which employees, or classes of employees,
are allowed to change certain things in the bug system. For example,
only the bug's designated QA Contact may be allowed to VERIFY the bug.
Bugzilla has been
designed to make it easy for you to write your own custom rules to define
who is allowed to make what sorts of value transition.
For maximum flexibility, customising this means editing Bugzilla's Perl
code. This gives the administrator complete control over exactly who is
allowed to do what. The relevant function is called
CheckCanChangeField(),
and is found in process_bug.cgi in your
Bugzilla directory. If you open that file and grep for
"sub CheckCanChangeField", you'll find it.
This function has been carefully commented to allow you to see exactly
how it works, and give you an idea of how to make changes to it. Certain
marked sections should not be changed - these are the "plumbing" which
makes the rest of the function work. In between those sections, you'll
find snippets of code like:
# Allow the owner to change anything.
if ($ownerid eq $whoid) {
return 1;
}
It's fairly obvious what this piece of code does.
So, how does one go about changing this function? Well, simple changes
can be made just be removing pieces - for example, if you wanted to
prevent any user adding a comment to a bug, just remove the lines marked
"Allow anyone to change comments." And if you want the reporter to have
no special rights on bugs they have filed, just remove the entire section
which refers to him.
More complex customisations are not much harder. Basically, you add
a check in the right place in the function, i.e. after all the variables
you are using have been set up. So, don't look at $ownerid before
$ownerid has been obtained from the database. You can either add a
positive check, which returns 1 (allow) if certain conditions are true,
or a negative check, which returns 0 (deny.) E.g.:
if ($field eq "qacontact") {
if (UserInGroup("quality_assurance")) {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}
This says that only users in the group "quality_assurance" can change
the QA Contact field of a bug. Getting more weird:
if (($field eq "priority") &&
($vars->{'user'}{'login'} =~ /.*\@example\.com$/))
{
if ($oldvalue eq "P1") {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}
This says that if the user is trying to change the priority field,
and their email address is @example.com, they can only do so if the
old value of the field was "P1". Not very useful, but illustrative.
For a list of possible field names, look in
data/versioncache for the list called
@::log_columns. If you need help writing custom
rules for your organisation, ask in the newsgroup.
Upgrading to New Releases
A plain Bugzilla is fairly easy to upgrade from one version to a
newer one. Always read the release notes to see if there are any issues
that you might need to take note of. It is recommended that you take a
backup of your database and your entire Bugzilla installation before attempting an
upgrade. You can upgrade a 'clean' installation by untarring a new
tarball over the old installation. If you are upgrading from 2.12 or
later, and have cvs installed, you can type cvs -z3 update,
and resolve conflicts if there are any.
However, things get a bit more complicated if you've made
changes to Bugzilla's code. In this case, you may have to re-make or
reapply those changes. One good method is to take a diff of your customised
version against the original, so you can survey all that you've changed.
Hopefully, templatisation will reduce the need for
this in the future.
From version 2.8 onwards, Bugzilla databases can be automatically
carried forward during an upgrade. However, because the developers of
Bugzilla are constantly adding new
tables, columns and fields, you'll probably get SQL errors if you just
update the code and attempt to use Bugzilla. Always run the
checksetup.pl
script whenever you upgrade your installation.
If you are running Bugzilla version 2.8 or lower, and wish to
upgrade to the latest version, please consult the file,
"UPGRADING-pre-2.8" in the Bugzilla root directory after untarring the
archive.
&integration;