How to install Flyspray The Bug Killer on a CentOS 7 VPS

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how-to-install-flyspray-the-bug-killer-on-a-centos-7-vpsThis tutorial will guide you through the steps of installing and configuring Flyspray The Bug Killer on a CentOS 7 VPS.

What is Flyspray?

Flyspray is an uncomplicated, web-based bug tracking system written in PHP for assisting with software development. It was designed primarily to suit everyone’s needs.

Flyspray is free software, released under the GNU GPL license. This essentially means that you can get Flyspray and use it free of charge. The source code is available and you are welcome to modify it according to your needs.

 

Some of the Flyspray features include:

  • Web-based, platform-independent
  • Multiple database support, currently MySQL and PGSQL
  • Easy installation
  • Easy to use
  • Multiple projects
  • ‘Watching’ tasks, with notification of changes (email or Jabber)
  • Comprehensive task history
  • File attachments
  • CSS themes
  • Advanced search features (though easy to use)
  • Atom/RSS feeds
  • Two syntax options for task descriptions and more (Dokuwiki / plain text)
  • Voting for tasks
  • Dependency graphs

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

Flyspray has very few external dependencies and this makes it easier to install and maintain than something like Bugzilla. The following stuff are required to get Flyspray up and running:

  • Computer to act as a server. Our SSD VPS hosting plans are perfect for this.
  • Web Server like Apache, Nginx etc.. Apache is recommended
  • PHP web scripting language 5.2 or later
  • PHP-GD library
  • PHP-XML library
  • OpenSSL library
  • MySQL or PostgreSQL database server

 

UPDATE THE SYSTEM

Before proceeding any further, ssh to your CentOS 7 SSD VPS, initiate a screen session and upgrade your system using yum:

## screen -U -S flyspray-screen
## yum update

 

INSTALL SOME PACKAGES

## yum install wget unzip vim

 

INSTALL LAMP

In this tutorial we are going to use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP) stack on one of our CentOS SSD VPS hosting plans. So install LAMP by following our great article on how to install LAMP on a CentOS 7 VPS.

Once LAMP is set-up on the system, install the following required packages and restart your webserver using:

## yum install php-xml openssl php-gd
## systemctl restart httpd

 

SETUP MARIADB (MYSQL) DATABASE

Flyspray requires a database to store its data. In this tutorial we are using MariaDB, which is a drop-in replacement for MySQL and it’s the default database server in CentOS 7.

## mysql -u root -p

MariaDB> create database flyspray;
MariaDB> grant all on flyspray.* to flyspray@localhost identified by 'STRONG_PASSWORD';
MariaDB> \q

 

INSTALL FLYSPRAY

First thing to do is to visit the Flyspray website and download the latest version available. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable version is 0.9.9.7. OK, download Flyspray archive using the following wget command:

## wget -P /tmp http://flyspray.org/flyspray-0.9.9.7.zip

Once the zip archive is downloaded, extract it to /var/www/html/flyspray using the command below:

## unzip -d /var/www/html/flyspray /tmp/flyspray-0.9.9.7.zip

Next, set-up proper ownership using the chown command:

## chown apache: -R /var/www/html/flyspray

and navigate to http://yourserver/flyspray/setup/ and follow along with the set-up wizard. Once you complete installation, remove the /var/www/html/flyspray/setup directory using:

## rm -rf /var/www/html/flyspray/setup/

flyspray_admin

 

POST-INSTALLATION STEPS

Optionally, you can set-up task dependency graphing using Graphviz. To achieve this, install the package using:

## yum install graphviz

and add the path to the graphviz binary in flyspray.conf.php

## vim /var/www/html/flyspray/flyspray.conf.php

[general]
dot_path = "/usr/bin/dot"

Enable the reminder daemon if you need reminders and background notifications by setting reminder_daemon to 1 in flyspray.conf.php:

## vim /var/www/html/flyspray/flyspray.conf.php

[general]
reminder_daemon = "1"

 

UPGRADING FLYSPRAY

  • Backup your files and database
  • Remove all files except the attachments directory and flyspray.conf.php
  • Copy the new files to flyspray directory
  • Make sure proper ownership/permission is granted at least to flyspray.conf.php
  • Run the upgrade at http://yourserver/flyspray/setup/upgrade.php

LET US DO THIS FOR YOU?

Of course you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our Linux VPS Hosting services, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install Flyspray and LAMP for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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