Java Power Tools

Chapter 27. Bugzilla

An Introduction to Bugzilla

Bugzilla^[*] is probably the most well-known of the open source issue tracking solutions, and is used by many high-profile open source projects such as Mozilla, Apache, and Eclipse. It is a mature, high-performance, feature-rich open source issue management solution well adapted for use in very large projects. It has been adopted by a large number of organizations and projects, both in the open source world and for commercial products. On the downside, it has a fairly well-earned reputation of being hard to install and to maintain, and its default user interface—with its fast, lightweight, no-frills screens—is possibly one of the ugliest and most unfriendly around. In this chapter, we will look at how to install, use, and customize Bugzilla.

Installing Bugzilla

Bugzilla has an arguably justifiable reputation for being fairly hard to install.

Bugzilla is typically installed in a Unix or Linux environment, although the more recent versions work fine on Windows as well. Bugzilla runs on Perl, and uses either MySQL or PostgreSQL as a backing database. You also need a web server: Apache is the typical choice. Installation is done from the command line and basically involves installing all the necessary Perl modules, setting up the database, and scheduling external Perl scripts to collect data for bug graphs and to send notifications. Notifications are done by email, so you also need a mail server. The installation process is long and involved, ...