If you just want to use Bugzilla, you do not need to install it. None of this chapter is relevant to you. Ask your Bugzilla administrator for the URL to access it over the web. The Bugzilla server software is usually installed on Linux or Solaris. If you are installing on another OS, check before you start your installation to see if there are any special instructions. As an alternative to following these instructions, you may wish to try Arne Schirmacher's unofficial and unsupported Bugzilla Installer, which installs Bugzilla and all its prerequisites on Linux or Solaris systems. This guide assumes that you have administrative access to the Bugzilla machine. It not possible to install and run Bugzilla itself without administrative access except in the very unlikely event that every single prerequisite is already installed. The installation process may make your machine insecure for short periods of time. Make sure there is a firewall between you and the Internet. You are strongly recommended to make a backup of your system before installing Bugzilla (and at regular intervals thereafter :-). In outline, the installation proceeds as follows: Install Perl (&min-perl-ver; or above for non-Windows platforms; &min-perl-ver-win; for Windows) Install MySQL (&min-mysql-ver; or above) Install a Webserver Install Bugzilla Install Perl modules Install a Mail Transfer Agent (Sendmail 8.7 or above, or an MTA that is Sendmail-compatible with at least this version) Configure all of the above.

Installed Version Test: perl -v Any machine that doesn't have Perl on it is a sad machine indeed. If you don't have it and your OS doesn't provide official packages, visit . Although Bugzilla runs with Perl &min-perl-ver;, it's a good idea to be using the latest stable version. As of this writing, that is Perl &newest-perl-ver;.

Installed Version Test: mysql -V If you don't have it and your OS doesn't provide official packages, visit . You need MySQL version &min-mysql-ver; or higher. Many of the binary versions of MySQL store their data files in /var. On some Unix systems, this is part of a smaller root partition, and may not have room for your bug database. To change the data directory, you have to build MySQL from source yourself, and set it as an option to configure. If you install from something other than a packaging/installation system (such as .rpm, .dep, .exe, or .msi) make sure the MySQL server is started when the machine boots.

Installed Version Test: view the default welcome page at http://<your-machine>/ You have freedom of choice here, pretty much any web server that is capable of running CGI scripts will work. However, we strongly recommend using the Apache web server (either 1.3.x or 2.x), and the installation instructions usually assume you are using it. If you have got Bugzilla working using another webserver, please share your experiences with us by filing a bug in &bzg-bugs;. If you don't have Apache and your OS doesn't provide official packages, visit .

Download a Bugzilla tarball (or check it out from CVS) and place it in a suitable directory, accessible by the default web server user (probably apache or www). Good locations are either directly in the main web space for your web server or perhaps in /usr/local with a symbolic link from the web space. The default Bugzilla distribution is NOT designed to be placed in a cgi-bin directory. This includes any directory which is configured using the ScriptAlias directive of Apache. Once all the files are in a web accessible directory, make that directory writable by your webserver's user. This is a temporary step until you run the checksetup.pl script, which locks down your installation.

Bugzilla's installation process is based on a script called checksetup.pl. The first thing it checks is whether you have appropriate versions of all the required Perl modules. The aim of this section is to pass this check. When it passes, do not run it again, but proceed to . At this point, you need to su to root. You should remain as root until the end of the install. Then run: bash# ./checksetup.pl checksetup.pl will print out a list of the required and optional Perl modules, together with the versions (if any) installed on your machine. The list of required modules is reasonably long; however, you may already have several of them installed. There is a meta-module called Bundle::Bugzilla, which installs all the other modules with a single command. You should use this if you are running Perl 5.6.1 or above. The preferred way of installing Perl modules is via CPAN on Unix, or PPM on Windows (see ). These instructions assume you are using CPAN; if for some reason you need to install the Perl modules manually, see . bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install "<modulename>"' If you using Bundle::Bugzilla, invoke the magic CPAN command on it. Otherwise, you need to work down the list of modules that checksetup.pl says are required, in the order given, invoking the command on each. Many people complain that Perl modules will not install for them. Most times, the error messages complain that they are missing a file in @INC. Virtually every time, this error is due to permissions being set too restrictively for you to compile Perl modules or not having the necessary Perl development libraries installed on your system. Consult your local UNIX systems administrator for help solving these permissions issues; if you are the local UNIX sysadmin, please consult the newsgroup/mailing list for further assistance or hire someone to help you out. Here is a complete list of modules and their minimum versions. Some modules have special installation notes, which follow. Required Perl modules: AppConfig (&min-appconfig-ver;) CGI (&min-cgi-ver;) Data::Dumper (&min-data-dumper-ver;) Date::Format (&min-date-format-ver;) DBI (&min-dbi-ver;) DBD::mysql (&min-dbd-mysql-ver;) File::Spec (&min-file-spec-ver;) File::Temp (&min-file-temp-ver;) Template (&min-template-ver;) Text::Wrap (&min-text-wrap-ver;) Optional Perl modules: GD (&min-gd-ver;) for bug charting Chart::Base (&min-chart-base-ver;) for bug charting GD::Graph (&min-gd-graph-ver;) for bug charting GD::Text::Align (&min-gd-text-align-ver;) for bug charting XML::Parser (&min-xml-parser-ver;) for the XML interface PatchReader (&min-patchreader-ver;) for pretty HTML view of patches MIME::Parser (&min-mime-parser-ver;) for the optional email interface

The installation process will ask you a few questions about the desired compilation target and your MySQL installation. For most of the questions the provided default will be adequate, but when asked if your desired target is the MySQL or mSQL packages, you should select the MySQL-related ones. Later you will be asked if you wish to provide backwards compatibility with the older MySQL packages; you should answer YES to this question. The default is NO. A host of 'localhost' should be fine. A testing user of 'test', with a null password, should have sufficient access to run tests on the 'test' database which MySQL creates upon installation.

When you install Template Toolkit, you'll get asked various questions about features to enable. The defaults are fine, except that it is recommended you use the high speed XS Stash of the Template Toolkit, in order to achieve best performance.

The GD module is only required if you want graphical reports. The Perl GD module requires some other libraries that may or may not be installed on your system, including libpng and libgd. The full requirements are listed in the Perl GD module README. If compiling GD fails, it's probably because you're missing a required library. The version of the GD module you need is very closely tied to the libgd version installed on your system. If you have a version 1.x of libgd the 2.x versions of the GD module won't work for you.

The Chart::Base module is only required if you want graphical reports. Note that earlier versions that 0.99c used GIFs, which are no longer supported by the latest versions of GD.

The GD::Graph module is only required if you want graphical reports.

The GD::Text::Align module is only required if you want graphical reports.

The XML::Parser module is only required if you want to import XML bugs using the importxml.pl script. This is required to use Bugzilla's "move bugs" feature; you may also want to use it for migrating from another bug database. XML::Parser requires that the expat library is already installed on your machine.

The MIME::Parser module is only required if you want to use the email interface located in the contrib directory.

The PatchReader module is only required if you want to use Patch Viewer, a Bugzilla feature to show code patches in your web browser in a more readable form.

Bugzilla is dependent on the availability of an e-mail system for its user authentication and for other tasks. On Linux, any Sendmail-compatible MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) will suffice. Sendmail, Postfix, qmail and Exim are examples of common MTAs. Sendmail is the original Unix MTA, but the others are easier to configure, and therefore many people replace Sendmail with Postfix or Exim. They are drop-in replacements, so that Bugzilla will not distinguish between them. If you are using Sendmail, version 8.7 or higher is required. If you are using a Sendmail-compatible MTA, it must be congruent with at least version 8.7 of Sendmail. Consult the manual for the specific MTA you choose for detailed installation instructions. Each of these programs will have their own configuration files where you must configure certain parameters to ensure that the mail is delivered properly. They are implemented as services, and you should ensure that the MTA is in the auto-start list of services for the machine. If a simple mail sent with the command-line 'mail' program succeeds, then Bugzilla should also be fine.

Poorly-configured MySQL and Bugzilla installations have given attackers full access to systems in the past. Please take the security parts of these guidelines seriously, even for Bugzilla machines hidden away behind your firewall. Be certain to read for some important security tips.

Once you run checksetup.pl with all the correct modules installed, it displays a message about, and write out a file called, localconfig. This file contains the default settings for a number of Bugzilla parameters. Load this file in your editor. The only value you need to change is $db_pass, the password for the user you will create for your database. Pick a strong password (for simplicity, it should not contain single quote characters) and put it here. The other options in the localconfig file are documented by their accompanying comments. If you have a slightly non-standard MySQL setup, you may wish to change one or more of the other "$db_*" parameters. You may also wish to change the names of the priorities, severities, operating systems and platforms for your installation. However, you can always change these after installation has finished; if you then re-run checksetup.pl, the changes will get picked up.

MySQL's default configuration is very insecure. has some good information for improving your installation's security.

You need to configure MySQL to accept large packets, if you want to have attachments larger than 64K. Add the text below to your /etc/my.cnf. There is also a parameter in Bugzilla for setting the maximum allowable attachment size, (default 1MB). Bugzilla will only accept attachments up to the lower of these two sizes. [mysqld] # Allow packets up to 1M set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1M

By default, words must be at least four characters in length in order to be indexed by MySQL's full-text indexes. This causes a lot of Bugzilla specific words to be missed, including "cc", "ftp" and "uri". MySQL can be configured to index those words by setting the ft_min_word_len param to the minimum size of the words to index. This can be done by modifying the /etc/my.cnf according to the example below: [mysqld] # Allow small words in full-text indexes ft_min_word_len=2 Rebuilding the indexes can be done based on documentation found at . The ft_min_word_len parameter is only suported in MySQL v4 or higher.

By default, MySQL will limit the size of a table to 4GB. This limit is present even if the underlying filesystem has no such limit or if you are using RAID. To set a higher limit, follow these instructions. Run the MySQL command-line client and enter: mysql> ALTER TABLE attachments AVG_ROW_LENGTH=1000000, MAX_ROWS=20000; The above command will change the limit to 20GB. Mysql will have to make a temporary copy of your entire table to do this. Ideally, you should do this when your attachments table is still small.

You need to add a new MySQL user for Bugzilla to use. (It's not safe to have Bugzilla use the MySQL root account.) The following instructions assume the defaults in localconfig; if you changed those, you need to modify the SQL command appropriately. You will need the $db_pass password you set in localconfig in . We use an SQL GRANT command to create a bugs user. This also restricts the bugs user to operations within a database called bugs, and only allows the account to connect from localhost. Modify it to reflect your setup if you will be connecting from another machine or as a different user. Run the mysql command-line client. If you are using MySQL 4.0 or newer, enter: mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE, LOCK TABLES, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '$db_pass'; mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; If you are using an older version of MySQL, the LOCK TABLES and CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES permissions will be unavailable and should be removed from the permissions list. In this case, the following command line can be used: mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '$db_pass'; mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Next, rerun checksetup.pl. It reconfirms that all the modules are present, and notices the altered localconfig file, which it assumes you have edited to your satisfaction. It compiles the UI templates, connects to the database using the 'bugs' user you created and the password you defined, and creates the 'bugs' database and the tables therein. After that, it asks for details of an administrator account. Bugzilla can have multiple administrators - you can create more later - but it needs one to start off with. Enter the email address of an administrator, his or her full name, and a suitable Bugzilla password. checksetup.pl will then finish. You may rerun checksetup.pl at any time if you wish.

Configure your web server according to the instructions in the appropriate section. The Bugzilla Team recommends Apache. No matter what webserver you choose, make sure that sensitive information is not remotely available by ensuring that the access controls in are properly applied.

Load httpd.conf in your editor. Uncomment (or add) the following line. This configures Apache to run .cgi files outside the cgi-bin directory. AddHandler cgi-script .cgi Apache uses <Directory> directives to permit fine-grained permission setting. Add the following two lines to a <Directory> directive that applies either to the Bugzilla directory or one of its parents (e.g. the <Directory /var/www/html> directive). This allows Bugzilla's .htaccess files to override global permissions, and allows .cgi files to run in the Bugzilla directory. Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks AllowOverride Limit Add index.cgi to the end of the DirectoryIndex line. checksetup.pl can set tighter permissions on Bugzilla's files and directories if it knows what group the webserver runs as. Look for the Group line in httpd.conf, and place that value in the $webservergroup variable in localconfig. Then rerun checksetup.pl.

If you need, or for some reason even want, to use Microsoft's Internet Information Services or Personal Web Server you should be able to. You will need to configure them to know how to run CGI scripts. This is described in Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q245225 for Internet Information Services and Q231998 for Personal Web Server. Also, and this can't be stressed enough, make sure that files such as localconfig and your data directory are secured as described in .

Ben FrantzDale reported success using AOL Server with Bugzilla. He reported his experience and what appears below is based on that. AOL Server will have to be configured to run CGI scripts, please consult the documentation that came with your server for more information on how to do this. Because AOL Server doesn't support .htaccess files, you'll have to create a TCL script. You should create an aolserver/modules/tcl/filter.tcl file (the filename shouldn't matter) with the following contents (change /bugzilla/ to the web-based path to your Bugzilla installation): ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/localconfig filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/localconfig~ filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/\#localconfig\# filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/*.pl filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/syncshadowdb filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/runtests.sh filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/data/* filter_deny ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/template/* filter_deny proc filter_deny { why } { ns_log Notice "filter_deny" return "filter_return" } This probably doesn't account for all possible editor backup files so you may wish to add some additional variations of localconfig. For more information, see bug 186383 or Bugtraq ID 6501. If you are using webdot from research.att.com (the default configuration for the webdotbase paramater), you will need to allow access to data/webdot/*.dot for the reasearch.att.com machine. If you are using a local installation of GraphViz, you will need to allow everybody to access *.png, *.gif, *.jpg, and *.map in the data/webdot directory.

Your Bugzilla should now be working. Access http://<your-bugzilla-server>/ - you should see the Bugzilla front page. If not, consult the Troubleshooting section, . Log in with the administrator account you defined in the last checksetup.pl run. You should go through the parameters on the Edit Parameters page (see link in the footer) and see if there are any you wish to change. They key parameters are documented in ; you should certainly alter maintainer and urlbase; you may also want to alter cookiepath or requirelogin. This would also be a good time to revisit the localconfig file and make sure that the names of the priorities, severities, platforms and operating systems are those you wish to use when you start creating bugs. Remember to rerun checksetup.pl if you change it. Bugzilla has several optional features which require extra configuration. You can read about those in .

Bugzilla has a number of optional features. This section describes how to configure or enable them.

If you have installed the necessary Perl modules you can start collecting statistics for the nifty Bugzilla graphs. bash# crontab -e This should bring up the crontab file in your editor. Add a cron entry like this to run collectstats.pl daily at 5 after midnight: 5 0 * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./collectstats.pl After two days have passed you'll be able to view bug graphs from the Reports page.

As well as the text-based dependency trees, Bugzilla also supports a graphical view of dependency relationships, using a package called 'dot'. Exactly how this works is controlled by the 'webdotbase' parameter, which can have one of three values: A complete file path to the command 'dot' (part of GraphViz) will generate the graphs locally A URL prefix pointing to an installation of the webdot package will generate the graphs remotely A blank value will disable dependency graphing. The easiest way to get this working is to install GraphViz. If you do that, you need to enable server-side image maps in Apache. Alternatively, you could set up a webdot server, or use the AT&T public webdot server. This is the default for the webdotbase param, but it's often overloaded and slow. Note that AT&T's server won't work if Bugzilla is only accessible using HARTS. Editor's note: What the heck is HARTS? Google doesn't know...

What good are bugs if they're not annoying? To help make them more so you can set up Bugzilla's automatic whining system to complain at engineers which leave their bugs in the NEW or REOPENED state without triaging them. This can be done by adding the following command as a daily crontab entry, in the same manner as explained above for bug graphs. This example runs it at 12.55am. 55 0 * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./whineatnews.pl

Patch Viewer is the engine behind Bugzilla's graphical display of code patches. You can integrate this with copies of the cvs, lxr and bonsai tools if you have them, by giving the locations of your installation of these tools in editparams.cgi. Patch Viewer also optionally will use the cvs, diff and interdiff command-line utilities if they exist on the system. Interdiff can be obtained from . If these programs are not in the system path, you can configure their locations in localconfig.

LDAP authentication is a module for Bugzilla's plugin authentication architecture. The existing authentication scheme for Bugzilla uses email addresses as the primary user ID, and a password to authenticate that user. All places within Bugzilla where you need to deal with user ID (e.g assigning a bug) use the email address. The LDAP authentication builds on top of this scheme, rather than replacing it. The initial log in is done with a username and password for the LDAP directory. This then fetches the email address from LDAP and authenticates seamlessly in the standard Bugzilla authentication scheme using this email address. If an account for this address already exists in your Bugzilla system, it will log in to that account. If no account for that email address exists, one is created at the time of login. (In this case, Bugzilla will attempt to use the "displayName" or "cn" attribute to determine the user's full name.) After authentication, all other user-related tasks are still handled by email address, not LDAP username. You still assign bugs by email address, query on users by email address, etc. Because the Bugzilla account is not created until the first time a user logs in, a user who has not yet logged is unknown to Bugzilla. This means they cannot be used as an assignee or QA contact (default or otherwise), added to any cc list, or any other such operation. One possible workaround is the bugzilla_ldapsync.rb script in the contrib directory. Another possible solution is fixing bug 201069. Parameters required to use LDAP Authentication: loginmethod This parameter should be set to LDAP only if you will be using an LDAP directory for authentication. If you set this param to LDAP but fail to set up the other parameters listed below you will not be able to log back in to Bugzilla one you log out. If this happens to you, you will need to manually edit data/params and set loginmethod to DB. LDAPserver This parameter should be set to the name (and optionally the port) of your LDAP server. If no port is specified, it assumes the default LDAP port of 389. Ex. ldap.company.com or ldap.company.com:3268 LDAPbinddn [Optional] Some LDAP servers will not allow an anonymous bind to search the directory. If this is the case with your configuration you should set the LDAPbinddn parameter to the user account Bugzilla should use instead of the anonymous bind. Ex. cn=default,cn=user:password LDAPBaseDN The LDAPBaseDN parameter should be set to the location in your LDAP tree that you would like to search for email addresses. Your uids should be unique under the DN specified here. Ex. ou=People,o=Company LDAPuidattribute The LDAPuidattribute parameter should be set to the attribute which contains the unique UID of your users. The value retrieved from this attribute will be used when attempting to bind as the user to confirm their password. Ex. uid LDAPmailattribute The LDAPmailattribute parameter should be the name of the attribute which contains the email address your users will enter into the Bugzilla login boxes. Ex. mail

Some Bugzilla pages have alternate formats, other than just plain HTML. In particular, a few Bugzilla pages can output their contents as either XUL (a special Mozilla format, that looks like a program GUI) or RDF (a type of structured XML that can be read by various programs). In order for your users to see these pages correctly, Apache must send them with the right MIME type. To do this, add the following lines to your Apache configuration, either in the <VirtualHost> section for your Bugzilla, or in the <Directory> section for your Bugzilla: AddType application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml .xul AddType text/xml .rdf

Many aspects of the Bugzilla installation can be affected by the the operating system you choose to install it on. Sometimes it can be made easier and others more difficult. This section will attempt to help you understand both the difficulties of running on specific operating systems and the utilities available to make it easier. If you have anything to add or notes for an operating system not covered, please file a bug in &bzg-bugs;.

Making Bugzilla work on Windows is still a painful processes. The Bugzilla Team is working to make it easier, but that goal is not considered a top priority. If you wish to run Bugzilla, we still recommend doing so on a Unix based system such as GNU/Linux. As of this writing, all members of the Bugzilla team and all known large installations run on Unix based systems. If after hearing all that, you have enough pain tolerance to attempt installing Bugzilla on Win32, here are some pointers.

Perl for Windows can be obtained from ActiveState. You should be able to find a compiled binary at .

Bugzilla on Windows requires the same perl modules found in . The main difference is that windows uses PPM instead of CPAN. C:\perl> ppm install <module name> The above syntax should work for all modules with the exception of Template Toolkit. The Template Toolkit website suggests using the instructions on OpenInteract's website. The following commands will install the required packages missing from the ActivePerl default installation: ppm repository add oi http://openinteract.sourceforge.net/ppmpackages ppm install DBD-mysql ppm install Template-Toolkit ppm install TimeDate

Bugzilla on win32 is mostly supported out of the box; one remaining issue is related to bug email. To make bug email work on Win32 (until bug 84876 lands), the simplest way is to have the Net::SMTP Perl module installed and change this line in the file Bugzilla/Bugmail.pm: open(SENDMAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail $sendmailparam -t -i") || die "Can't open sendmail"; print SENDMAIL trim($msg) . "\n"; close SENDMAIL; to use Net::SMTP; my $smtp_server = 'smtp.mycompany.com'; # change this # Use die on error, so that the mail will be in the 'unsent mails' and # can be sent from the sanity check page. my $smtp = Net::SMTP->new($smtp_server) || die 'Cannot connect to server \'$smtp_server\''; $smtp->mail('bugzilla-daemon@mycompany.com'); # change this $smtp->to($person); $smtp->data(); $smtp->datasend($msg); $smtp->dataend(); $smtp->quit; Don't forget to change the name of your SMTP server and the domain of the sending email address (after the '@') in the above lines of code.

As is the case on Unix based systems, any web server should be able to handle Bugzilla; however, the Bugzilla Team still recommends Apache whenever asked. No matter what web server you choose, be sure to pay attention to the security notes in . More information on configuring specific web servers can be found in . If using Apache on windows, you can set the ScriptInterpreterSource directive in your Apache config to avoid having to modify the first line of every script to contain your path to perl instead of /usr/bin/perl.

Apple did not include the GD library with Mac OS X. Bugzilla needs this for bug graphs. You can install it using a program called Fink, which is similar in nature to the CPAN installer, but installs common GNU utilities. Fink is available from . Follow the instructions for setting up Fink. Once it's installed, you'll want to use it to install the gd2 package. It will prompt you for a number of dependencies, type 'y' and hit enter to install all of the dependencies and then watch it work. You will then be able to use CPAN to install the GD Perl module. To prevent creating conflicts with the software that Apple installs by default, Fink creates its own directory tree at /sw where it installs most of the software that it installs. This means your libraries and headers will be at /sw/lib and /sw/include instead of /usr/lib and /usr/include. When the Perl module config script asks where your libgd is, be sure to tell it /sw/lib. Also available via Fink is expat. After using fink to install the expat package you will be able to install XML::Parser using CPAN. There is one caveat. Unlike recent versions of the GD module, XML::Parser doesn't prompt for the location of the required libraries. When using CPAN, you will need to use the following command sequence: # perl -MCPAN -e'look XML::Parser' # perl Makefile.PL EXPATLIBPATH=/sw/lib EXPATINCPATH=/sw/include # make; make test; make install # exit The look command will download the module and spawn a new shell with the extracted files as the current working directory. The exit command will return you to your original shell. You should watch the output from these make commands, especially make test as errors may prevent XML::Parser from functioning correctly with Bugzilla.

Linux-Mandrake 8.0 includes every required and optional library for Bugzilla. The easiest way to install them is by using the urpmi utility. If you follow these commands, you should have everything you need for Bugzilla, and ./checksetup.pl should not complain about any missing libraries. You may already have some of these installed. bash# urpmi perl-mysql bash# urpmi perl-chart bash# urpmi perl-gd bash# urpmi perl-MailTools bash# urpmi apache-modules for Bugzilla email integration

If you are running a *NIX OS as non-root, either due to lack of access (web hosts, for example) or for security reasons, this will detail how to install Bugzilla on such a setup. It is recommended that you read through the first to get an idea on the installation steps required. (These notes will reference to steps in that guide.)

You may have MySQL installed as root. If you're setting up an account with a web host, a MySQL account needs to be set up for you. From there, you can create the bugs account, or use the account given to you. You may have problems trying to set up GRANT permissions to the database. If you're using a web host, chances are that you have a separate database which is already locked down (or one big database with limited/no access to the other areas), but you may want to ask your system adminstrator what the security settings are set to, and/or run the GRANT command for you. Also, you will probably not be able to change the MySQL root user password (for obvious reasons), so skip that step.

Create a file .my.cnf in your home directory (using /home/foo in this example) as follows.... [mysqld] datadir=/home/foo/mymysql socket=/home/foo/mymysql/thesock port=8081 [mysql] socket=/home/foo/mymysql/thesock port=8081 [mysql.server] user=mysql basedir=/var/lib [safe_mysqld] err-log=/home/foo/mymysql/the.log pid-file=/home/foo/mymysql/the.pid

You can install MySQL as a not-root, if you really need to. Build it with PREFIX set to /home/foo/mysql, or use pre-installed executables, specifying that you want to put all of the data files in /home/foo/mysql/data. If there is another MySQL server running on the system that you do not own, use the -P option to specify a TCP port that is not in use.

After your mysqld program is built and any .my.cnf file is in place, you must initialize the databases (ONCE). bash$ mysql_install_db Then start the daemon with bash$ safe_mysql & After you start mysqld the first time, you then connect to it as "root" and GRANT permissions to other users. (Again, the MySQL root account has nothing to do with the *NIX root account.) You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either ask your system administrator to add them to system startup files, or add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons and restart them if needed. Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first consulting your system administrator! Daemons use up system resources and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any machine on which you are a user!

On the extremely rare chance that you don't have Perl on the machine, you will have to build the sources yourself. The following commands should get your system installed with your own personal version of Perl: bash$ wget http://perl.com/CPAN/src/stable.tar.gz bash$ tar zvxf stable.tar.gz bash$ cd perl-5.8.1 (or whatever the version of Perl is called) bash$ sh Configure -de -Dprefix=/home/foo/perl bash$ make && make test && make install Once you have Perl installed into a directory (probably in ~/perl/bin), you'll have to change the locations on the scripts, which is detailed later on this page.

Installing the Perl modules as a non-root user is probably the hardest part of the process. There are two different methods: a completely independant Perl with its own modules, or personal modules using the current (root installed) version of Perl. The independant method takes up quite a bit of disk space, but is less complex, while the mixed method only uses as much space as the modules themselves, but takes more work to setup.

The independant method requires that you install your own personal version of Perl, as detailed in the previous section. Once installed, you can start the CPAN shell with the following command: bash$ /home/foo/perl/bin/perl -MCPAN -e 'shell' And then: cpan> install Bundle::Bugzilla With this method, module installation will usually go a lot smoother, but if you have any hang-ups, you can consult the next section.

First, you'll need to configure CPAN to install modules in your home directory. The CPAN FAQ says the following on this issue: 5) I am not root, how can I install a module in a personal directory? You will most probably like something like this: o conf makepl_arg "LIB=~/myperl/lib \ INSTALLMAN1DIR=~/myperl/man/man1 \ INSTALLMAN3DIR=~/myperl/man/man3" install Sybase::Sybperl You can make this setting permanent like all "o conf" settings with "o conf commit". You will have to add ~/myperl/man to the MANPATH environment variable and also tell your Perl programs to look into ~/myperl/lib, e.g. by including use lib "$ENV{HOME}/myperl/lib"; or setting the PERL5LIB environment variable. Another thing you should bear in mind is that the UNINST parameter should never be set if you are not root. So, you will need to create a Perl directory in your home directory, as well as the lib, man, man/man1, and man/man3 directories in that Perl directory. Set the MANPATH variable and PERL5LIB variable, so that the installation of the modules goes smoother. (Setting UNINST=0 in your "make install" options, on the CPAN first-time configuration, is also a good idea.) After that, go into the CPAN shell: bash$ perl -MCPAN -e 'shell' From there, you will need to type in the above "o conf" command and commit the changes. Then you can run through the installation: cpan> install Bundle::Bugzilla Most of the module installation process should go smoothly. However, you may have some problems with Template. When you first start, you will want to try to install Template with the XS Stash options on. If this doesn't work, it may spit out C compiler error messages and croak back to the CPAN shell prompt. So, redo the install, and turn it off. (In fact, say no to all of the Template questions.) It may also start failing on a few of the tests. If the total tests passed is a reasonable figure (90+%), force the install with the following command: cpan> force install Template You may also want to install the other optional modules: cpan> install GD cpan> install Chart::Base cpan> install MIME::Parser

Ideally, this also needs to be installed as root and run under a special webserver account. As long as the web server will allow the running of *.cgi files outside of a cgi-bin, and a way of denying web access to certain files (such as a .htaccess file), you should be good in this department.

You can run Apache as a non-root user, but the port will need to be set to one above 1024. If you type httpd -V, you will get a list of the variables that your system copy of httpd uses. One of those, namely HTTPD_ROOT, tells you where that installation looks for its config information. From there, you can copy the config files to your own home directory to start editing. When you edit those and then use the -d option to override the HTTPD_ROOT compiled into the web server, you get control of your own customized web server. You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either ask your system administrator to add them to system startup files, or add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons and restart them if needed. Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first consulting your system administrator! Daemons use up system resources and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any machine on which you are a user!

If you had to install Perl modules as a non-root user () or to non-standard directories, you will need to change the scripts, setting the correct location of the Perl modules: perl -pi -e 's@use strict\;@use strict\; use lib \"/home/foo/perl/lib\"\;@' *cgi *pl Bug.pm processmail syncshadowdb Change /home/foo/perl/lib to your personal Perl library directory. You can probably skip this step if you are using the independant method of Perl module installation. When you run ./checksetup.pl to create the localconfig file, it will list the Perl modules it finds. If one is missing, go back and double-check the module installation from the CPAN shell, then delete the localconfig file and try again. The one option in localconfig you might have problems with is the web server group. If you can't successfully browse to the index.cgi (like a Forbidden error), you may have to relax your permissions, and blank out the web server group. Of course, this may pose as a security risk. Having a properly jailed shell and/or limited access to shell accounts may lessen the security risk, but use at your own risk.