Request Tracker, an enterprise-grade issue tracking system
RT is an open source, enterprise-grade issue and ticket tracking system.
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RT allows organizations to keep track of what needs to get done, who is working on which tasks, what’s already been done, and when tasks were (or weren’t) completed.
RT doesn’t cost anything to use, no matter how much you use it; it is freely available under the terms of Version 2 of the GNU General Public License.
RT is commercially-supported software. To purchase hosting, support, training, custom development, or professional services, please get in touch with us at sales@bestpractical.com.
Perl 5.26.3 or later (http://www.perl.org).
A supported SQL database
A webserver with FastCGI or mod_perl support
Another webserver with FastCGI support
RT’s FastCGI handler needs to access RT’s configuration file.
Various and sundry perl modules
Full-text indexing support in your database
An external HTML converter
A TLS certificate for your web server
Set( $WebSecureCookies, 0 );
Unpack this distribution other than where you want to install RT. Your home directory or /usr/local/src are both fine choices. Change to that directory and run the following command:
tar xzvf rt.tar.gz
Run the configure script. To see the list of options, run:
./configure --help
Or review the options on our documentation page for configure.
Then re-run ./configure with the flags you want.
RT defaults to installing in /opt/rt6. It
tries to guess which of www-data, www, apache or nobody your
webserver will run as, but you can override that behavior. Note
that the default install directory in /opt/rt6 does not work under
SELinux’s default configuration.
The default database type (—with-db-type) is mysql, which means
MySQL version 8 and later. Starting in RT 5.0.6, use mysql5 to run
MySQL 5.7 or older, and use MariaDB to run with MariaDB.
If you are upgrading from a previous version of RT, please review
the upgrade notes for the appropriate versions, which can be found
in docs/UPGRADING-*.
If you are upgrading from 5.0.x to 6.0.x you should review both the UPGRADING-5.0 and UPGRADING-6.0 files.
If you are upgrading from 4.4.x, you should review
UPGRADING-4.4 as well.
Any upgrade steps given in version-specific UPGRADING files should
be run after the rest of the steps below; however, please read the
relevant documentation before beginning the upgrade to be
aware of important changes.
RT stores the arguments given to ./configure at the top of theetc/RT_Config.pm file in case you need to recreate your previous use
of ./configure.
Make sure that RT has the Perl and system libraries it needs to run.
Check for missing dependencies by running:
make testdeps
If the script reports any missing dependencies, install them by
hand, or run the following command as a user who has permission to
install perl modules on your system:
make fixdeps
Some modules require user input or environment variables to install
correctly, so it may be necessary to install them manually. Some modules
also require external source libraries, so you may need to install
additional packages.
Ticket relationship graphing requires the graphviz
library which you should install using your distribution’s package manager.
Dashboard emails containing charts require a Chrome-based browser
to be installed on the RT server. Most distributions have a package
for “chromium”.
See docs/rt_perl.pod
for additional information about installing perl and RT’s dependencies.
Check to make sure everything was installed properly.
make testdeps
It might sometimes be necessary to run “make fixdeps” several times
to install all necessary perl modules.
6a. If you are installing RT for the first time
As a user with permission to install RT in your chosen directory, type:
make install
To configure RT with the web installer, run:
/opt/rt6/sbin/rt-server
and follow the instructions. Once completed, you should now have a
working RT instance running with the standalone rt-server. Press
Ctrl-C to stop it, and proceed to Step 7 to configure a recommended
deployment environment for production.
To configure RT manually, you must setup etc/RT_SiteConfig.pm in
your RT installation directory. You’ll need to add any values you
need to change from the defaults in etc/RT_Config.pm.
As a user with permission to read RT’s configuration file, type:
make initialize-database
If the make fails, type:
make dropdb
and re-run make initialize-database.
6b. If you are upgrading from an older release of RT
Before upgrading, always ensure that you have a complete current
backup. If you don’t have a current backup, upgrading your database
could accidentally damage it and lose data, or worse.
If you are using MySQL, please read the instructions in
docs/UPGRADING.mysql
as well to ensure that you do not corrupt existing data.
You may also wish to put incoming email into a hold queue, to avoid temporary delivery failure messages if
your upgrade is expected to take several hours.
Back up your database, as the next step may make changes to your database’s schema and data.
Install new binaries, config files and libraries by running:
make upgrade
This will also prompt you to upgrade your database by running:
make upgrade-database
When you run it, you will be prompted for your previous version of
RT (such as 4.4.1) so that the appropriate set of database
upgrades can be applied.
If make upgrade-database completes without error, your upgrade
has been successful; you should now run any commands that were
supplied in version-specific UPGRADING documentation. You should
then restart your webserver.
Depending on the size and composition of your database, some upgrade
steps may run for a long time. You may also need extra disk space or
other resources while running upgrade steps. It’s a good idea to run
through the upgrade steps on a test server so you know what to expect
before running on your production system.
Configure the web server, as described in docs/web_deployment.pod,
and the email gateway, as described below.
NOTE: The default credentials for RT are:
- User: `root`- Pass: `password`
Not changing the root password from the default is a SECURITY risk!
Set up users, groups, queues, scrips and access control.
Until you do this, RT will not be able to send or receive email, nor
will it be more than marginally functional. This is not an optional
step.
Set up automated recurring tasks (cronjobs):
Depending on your configuration, RT stores sessions in the database
or on the file system. In either case, sessions are only needed until
a user logs out, so old sessions should be cleaned up with the
sbin/rt-clean-sessions utility.
To generate email digest messages, you must arrange for the provided
utility to be run once daily, and once weekly. You may also want
to arrange for the sbin/rt-email-dashboards utility to be run hourly.
RT automatically creates temporary short URLs for searches and these
can be cleared from the system periodically as well. See the documentation
for the sbin/rt-clean-shorteners
tool for options. You can schedule this to run regularly if desired.
RT provides an interface for running scheduled jobs to automate
some tasks, like resolving tickets after some period of time.
To enable this, schedule bin/rt-run-scheduled-processes
to run every 15 minutes.
If your task scheduler is cron, you can configure it by
adding the following lines as /etc/cron.d/rt:
0 0 * * * root /opt/rt6/sbin/rt-clean-sessions0 0 * * * root /opt/rt6/sbin/rt-email-digest -m daily0 0 * * 0 root /opt/rt6/sbin/rt-email-digest -m weekly0 * * * * root /opt/rt6/sbin/rt-email-dashboards*/15 * * * * root /opt/rt6/bin/rt-run-scheduled-processes
Other optional features like full text search indexes, external
attachments, etc., may also have recurring jobs to schedule in cron.
Follow the documentation for these features when you enable them.
Configure the RT email gateway. To let email flow to your RT
server, you need to add a few lines of configuration to your mail
server’s “aliases” file. These lines “pipe” incoming email messages
from your mail server to RT.
Add the following lines to /etc/aliases (or your local equivalent)
on your mail server:
rt: "|/opt/rt6/bin/rt-mailgate --queue general --action correspond --url http://rt.example.com"rt-comment: "|/opt/rt6/bin/rt-mailgate --queue general --action comment --url http://rt.example.com"
You’ll need to add similar lines for each queue you want to be able to
send email to. To find out more about how to configure RT’s email
gateway, see bin/rt-mailgate.
Set up full text search
Full text search (FTS) without database indexing is a very slow operation,
and is thus disabled by default. You’ll need to follow the instructions in
docs/full_text_indexing.pod to enable FTS.
Set up automatic backups for RT and its data as described in
docs/system_administration/database.pod.
If RT is mission-critical for you or if you use it heavily, we recommend
that you purchase a commercial support contract. Details on support
contracts are available at http://www.bestpractical.com or by writing to
sales@bestpractical.com. We also offer managed hosting plans if you
prefer to have someone else manage the RT server.
If you’re interested in having RT extended or customized or would like
more information about commercial support options, please send email to
sales@bestpractical.com to discuss rates and availability.
To keep up to date on the latest RT tips, techniques and extensions, you
may wish to join the RT Community Forum website. You can find it here:
https://forum.bestpractical.com
You’ll find many different categories of discussion there including the
RT Users category for general RT topics. If you’re interested
in customizing RT code, there is a category for RT Developers with more
technical topics.
The RT wiki, at https://rt-wiki.bestpractical.com, is also an excellent
resource.
If you believe you’ve discovered a security issue in RT, please send an
email to security@bestpractical.com with a detailed description of the
issue, and a secure means to respond to you (such as your PGP public
key). You can find our PGP key and fingerprint at
https://bestpractical.com/security/
RT’s a pretty complex application, and as you get up to speed, you might
run into some trouble. Generally, it’s best to ask about things you run
into on the Community Forum (or pick up a commercial support
contract from Best Practical). But, sometimes people do run into
bugs. In the exceedingly unlikely event that you hit a bug in RT, please
report it! We’d love to hear about problems you have with RT, so we can
fix them.
To report a bug, go to our public RT instance
and create a ticket. Note that this is a public RT instance, so the information
you share will be visible to others. You can browse some other bug tickets
to see what is shown.
COPYRIGHT:
This software is Copyright (c) 1996-2025 Best Practical Solutions, LLC
sales@bestpractical.com
(Except where explicitly superseded by other copyright notices)
LICENSE:
This work is made available to you under the terms of Version 2 of
the GNU General Public License. A copy of that license should have
been provided with this software, but in any event can be snarfed
from www.gnu.org.
This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
02110-1301 or visit their web page on the internet at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html.
CONTRIBUTION SUBMISSION POLICY:
(The following paragraph is not intended to limit the rights granted
to you to modify and distribute this software under the terms of
the GNU General Public License and is only of importance to you if
you choose to contribute your changes and enhancements to the
community by submitting them to Best Practical Solutions, LLC.)
By intentionally submitting any modifications, corrections or
derivatives to this work, or any other work intended for use with
Request Tracker, to Best Practical Solutions, LLC, you confirm that
you are the copyright holder for those contributions and you grant
Best Practical Solutions, LLC a nonexclusive, worldwide, irrevocable,
royalty-free, perpetual, license to use, copy, create derivative
works based on those contributions, and sublicense and distribute
those contributions and any derivatives thereof.
