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os-Ticket is a widely-used and trusted open source support ticket system. It seamlessly routes inquiries created via email, web-forms and phone calls into a simple, easy-to-use, multi-user, web-based customer support platform. Generally Used for Help Desk services.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation osTicket open source support ticket system on an Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus server.

Install osTicket on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, PHP) server.

A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also install all required PHP modules:

apt-get install php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cgi php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-xmlrpc php7.0-gd

Step 3. Installing osTicket.

Download the latest stable version of osTicket, At the moment of writing this article it is version 1.10.1:

sudo mkdir /var/www/html/osticket
cd /var/www/html/osticket
wget http://osticket.com/sites/default/files/download/osTicket-v1.10.1.zip
sudo unzip osTicket-v1.10.1.zip

Next, copy the sample config file:

cp upload/include/ost-sampleconfig.php upload/include/ost-config.php

We will need to change some folders permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/osticket

Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for osTicket.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each steps carefully which will set root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the osTicket. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for osTicket installation:

CREATE DATABASE osticket;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON osticket.* TO 'osticketuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Step 5. Configuring Apache web server for osTicket.

Create a new virtual host directive in Apache. For example, create a new Apache configuration file named ‘osticket.conf’ on your virtual server:

sudo a2enmod rewrite
touch /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/osticket.conf
nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/osticket.conf

Add the following lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/osticket/upload/
ServerName your-domain.com
ServerAlias www.your-domain.com
<Directory /var/www/html/osticket/upload>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-error_log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/your-domain.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Now, we can restart Apache web server so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart apache2.service

Step 6. Accessing osTicket.

osTicket will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com or http://server-ip and complete the required the steps to finish the installation.

Once the installation has completed, remove the setup directory and change the permission of the osTicket config file:

sudo rm -rf /var/www/html/osticket/upload/setup
sudo chmod 0644 /var/www/html/osticket/include/ost-config.php

Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed osTicket. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing osTicket open source support ticket system on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official osTicket web site.