Support Your clients by Web or Email with osTicket.
If your business has a need to automate support or customer interaction and track service levels, osTicket is a free, open source tool, that meets and exceeds expectations.
Businesses at every level of growth can benefit from osTicket's system. Best of all, it's the client that benefits the most from service imporovements.
For the instructions to work, you will need to have LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL or MariaDB and PHP) already installed on your VPS. Our instructions for installing LAMP on Ubunutu 14.04 can be found here.
The instructions are tried and true, and were verified on InterServer`s OpenVZ VPS Hostingservice, utilizing Ubuntu 14.04 64 minimal.
You should be able to copy and paste into SSH as you go along.
Requirements:
  • LAMP installed. See our instructions.
  • Setup was conducted on InterServer’s OpenVZ VPS Hostingwith Ubuntu 14.4 64-bit (instructions are for minimal distribution, but should work for regular distribution as well).
  • Putty or similar SSH client
  • root login and password or an account capable of sudo
Installation
Start by updating package sources:
  • sudo apt-get update
Now will install unzip, since our file is in zip format:
  • sudo apt-get install zip unzip
Create a database for osTicket in mySQL:
  • sudo mysql -u root -p
You will need to copy and paste each line. Change the highlightedvalues to values you want (most important are user and password).
  • CREATE DATABASEostdb;
  • CREATE USERosticket_user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
  • GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ONostdb.* TOosticket_user@localhost;
  • FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
  • exit
Write down the values you entered, because we will need to use the to configure osTicket later.
First will go to our home directory:
  • cd ~
Make a directory and move to it:
  • sudo mkdir osticket
  • cd osticket
Now, download osTicket:
  • sudo wget http://osticket.com/sites/default/files/download/osTicket-v1.9.11.zip
Unzip it:
  • sudo unzip osTicket-v1.9.11.zip -d ~/osticket
The zip file will extract two directories. Scripts and Upload. Make a directory on /var/www/html where our installation will reside:
  • sudo mkdir /var/www/html/support/
Move the upload to our newly created web directory:
  • sudo cp -rv ~/osticket/upload/* /var/www/html/support/
Copy the configuration file:
  • cp /var/www/html/support/include/ost-sampleconfig.php /var/www/html/support/include/ost-config.php
Give Apache ownership of this new directory:
  • sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/support/
PHP
(Optional) osTicket has the ability to fetch emails and turn them into tickets. If this is not one of your requirements, you may skip this step. Otherwise, in order to use the email feature, we need to install a PHP module, php5-imap:
  • sudo apt-get install php5-imap
Now link the module:
  • sudo php5enmod imap
Restart Apache:
  • sudo service apache2 restart
Side Note: The three commands above are the way to correct the "IMAP doesn't exist. PHP must be compiled with IMAP enabled." error on the osTicket installer, after you have installed php5-imap.
Install and Configure from Browser
Open your browser and visit (replace with domain name or ip):
  • yourdomain.com/support/
Remember to populate the database fields with the variables you used when you created the database. Leave the table prefix and the server name with the defaults, unless you know you want to specify something else.
Your osTicket system is now available on:
Support Center:
yourdomain.com/support/
Staff control panel:
yourdomain.com/support/scp
Clean up
Change permissions on ost-config.php:
  • chmod 0644 /var/www/html/support/include/ost-config.php
Delete the setup directory:
  • rm -rf /var/www/html/support/setup
Remove our installation files:
  • rm -rf ~/osticket
Customizing osTicket
osTicket can be configured to suit just about any support center need. Please visit the wiki for documentation.