RT Essentials

Chapter 2. Installation

Before you can make use of most of the wonderful advice and tricks in this book, you need a live RT instance running. If you already have an installed and running RT instance, skip to Chapter 3. In many ways, the initial installation of RT is the hardest part. RT is a complex Perl application with many dependencies—once all of those dependencies are in place, RT installs easily. Most of the time installing RT is spent installing those modules.

RT was designed to run on UNIX and UNIX-like systems. This means Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, IRIX, HP/UX, Mac OS X, and similar systems. If your operating system of choice has pre-built packages for RT, that is the easiest way to install it. These third party packages are contributed and don’t come from the RT developers. As of this writing, packages are available for Debian, FreeBSD, RedHat, and Mandrake Linux. There are some downsides to these packages: they may put files in unexpected locations to conform to packaging requirements, and they also may be out of date.

RT also runs on Windows. It is experimental and unsupported, so this chapter won’t cover it, but it generally works. All of the component pieces (Perl, Apache, and MySQL) are available natively. The easiest way to get it running is to use Autrijus Tang’s pre-packaged version of RT for Windows, which includes all the component pieces in one convenient installer. Download it from http://wiki.bestpractical.com/?WindowsOSInstallGuide.

Requirements

Before you begin ...