NATHANWIEGAND.COM

I just heard about Mantis a PHP based bug-tracker. I’ve never really had experience with any of these and it looks much lighter weight than Bugzilla or something like that. I haven’t even gotten to play with it yet because of installation issues. So, let me share some of them with you now:

Go ahead an temporarily create a muser user in my MySQL db:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO muser@locahost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';

You’ll take away global permissions in a minute.

Now, just unzip the Mantiz in some directory that your webserver has access to and then navigate to it in your browser. This was “/var/www/mantis” and http://localhost/mantis for me.

Following the instructions will get this all installed. Now, I don’t have a mail server, so I cannot create users. So, the default user is “administrator” and the default password is “root”. This took me some googling to figure out.

Create a new user for yourself. Note that if you don’t have a mail server running, you cannot successfully create an account because you don’t know what the temporary password is. There’s probably a better way to fix this, but here’s how I did it.

Create a new file in your webdirecotry named “w.php”:

< ?php
$mynewpassword='whatever';
echo md5($mynewpassword) . "
";
echo crypt($mynewpassword);
?>

When you run this, the output should be some very long string. For me, the first one did the trick. Copy this one to the clipboard. So, let’s get our hands dirty and fix this. Go into mysql as root (sudo mysql):

mysql> USE  bugtracker;
mysql> UPDATE mantis_user_table
             SET password='WhateverYouCopiedEarlier'
             WHERE username='yourusername';

Now, try to log in to your Mantis. If this didn’t work, try the second long string that “crypt” generated. If that didn’t work, um, sorry.

Ok, so putting things back the way you found them:

REVOKE ALL ON *.* FROM muser@localhost;
GRANT ALL ON bugtracker.* TO muser@localhost;

Finally, you should disable your “administrator” account.

That’s all I have for now. I might have a review or something later. This was just a brief writeup of what was necessary for me to get rolling.