Install osTicket ( Open source ticketing tool )

The osTicket is one of the famous open source ticketing tool , widely use in many organisations and companies. We will explain, how to install osTicket ( Open source ticketing tool) on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS . We will do self hosted osTicket installation. In case, you are looking for professional support for osTicket , that is also available.

Why we need ticketing tool

This is something important to know , why we need ticketing tool. In many IT companies , ticketing system play very vital role. We are trying to list out some of them –
1. We can track the progress of work through SLA (Service-Level Agreement)
2. We can analyse the quality of work.
3. We can record the performance of employees.
4. We can mitigate the frequent occurring issues by analysis / RCA (Root Cause Analysis) .

Features of osTicket

Custom Fields : Customize the data collected from users when submitting a ticket to help get straight to the issue.
Rich Text HTML : Rich text or HTML email, is supported and allows for rich text markup in staff replies and internal notes posted to the ticket thread.
Ticket Filters : Define rules to route incoming tickets to the right departments or staff members, and action triggers.
Help Topics : Configurable help topics for web tickets. Route inquiries without exposing internal departments or priorities.
Agent Collision Avoidance : Ticket locking mechanism to allow staff to lock tickets during response and avoid conflicting or dual responses.
Assign and Transfer : Transfer tickets between departments to make sure it’s being handled by the correct staff. Assign tickets to a staff or to a team.
Auto-Responder : Configurable automatic reply sent out when a new ticket is opened or a message is received.
Internal Notes : Add internal notes to tickets for staff. Activity logs let you see events or actions that have been taken, when they took place, and by whom.
Service Level Agreements : SLA Plans allow you to track tickets and due dates without the hassle.
Customer Portal : All support requests and responses are archived online. User can login using email and ticket ID. No user account or registration required to submit a ticket.
Dashboard Reports : Get system overview and basic historical statistics on tickets count and status per department, staff and help topics.

Install osTicket

In this section we will install self hosted osTicket on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Server.

Basic Requirement to install osTicket

Web Server: Apache/ NginX
PHP Version: 5.3+
MySQL Database: 5.0+

Download osTicket

Download the latest stable osTicket package. We are using command line to download currently available osTicket-v1.9.8.1 package

wget http://osticket.com/sites/default/files/download/osTicket-v1.9.8.1.zip

Extract downloaded osTicket package and copy to web data directory

Unzip osTicket package. We will unzip the osTicket package in newly created directory called output .

mkdir output

unzip osTicket-v1.9.8.1.zip -d output/

Now create directory called osticket in /var/www/html

mkdir -p /var/www/nginx/html/osticket/

Copy the extracted out osTicket code from output directory to /var/www/html/osticket directory

cp -rvf output/upload/* /var/www/nginx/html/osticket/

Change owner and group of /var/www/html/osticket/ directory to nginx.

Nginx sample configure

server {
  listen 80;
        server_name localhost;

        root   /var/www/nginx/html/osticket;

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;

        index index.php;
        client_max_body_size 2000M;
        client_body_buffer_size 100M;
        client_header_buffer_size 10M;
        large_client_header_buffers 2 10M;

        client_body_timeout 12;
        client_header_timeout 12;
        keepalive_timeout 15;
        send_timeout 10;

        gzip             on;
        gzip_comp_level  2;
        gzip_min_length  1000;
        gzip_proxied     expired no-cache no-store private auth;
        gzip_types       text/plain application/x-javascript text/xml text/css application/xml;

        set $path_info "";

        location ~ /include {
            deny all;
            return 403;
        }

        if ($request_uri ~ "^/api(/[^\?]+)") {
            set $path_info $1;
        }

        location ~ ^/api/(?:tickets|tasks).*$ {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /api/http.php?$query_string;
        }

        if ($request_uri ~ "^/scp/.*\.php(/[^\?]+)") {
            set $path_info $1;
        }

        location ~ ^/scp/ajax.php/.*$ {
            try_files $uri $uri/ /scp/ajax.php?$query_string;
        }

        location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ index.php;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO    $path_info;
            fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        }
}