Popular Free Ticketing Based Helpdesk and Customer Care System

System Requirements

osTicket is PHP and MySQL based help ticketing system, you must have the following software

• PHP 5.6+ (7.3 recommended)
• MySQL 5.0+ (5.5 recommended) +
• Apache 2.4 + / Nginx 1.8 + / Microsoft IIS 7

Features

osTicket is a popular customer support system that is equipped with all the essential features to manage wide range of businesses like electrics,  production, service provider, game development and  construction. Important features include

Customer Portal

It has powerful customer portal that let you sign in with your email address and a ticket number and allow support team to register profile to get full access to all assigned tickets. It has strong knowledge base that ease users to self-service their activities.

Easy to Customize

osTicket offers wide range of customization features that let you customize Forms, Lists, Fields, Columns and Queues as per your business requirements. It helps you collect data from your customers when creating ticket in the way that suits your business necessities.

Help Topics

You can configure help topics for support tickets that will allow you to route inquiries to concern department for rapid response.

Tasks

Tasks can be related with tickets or they can remain solitary in the help desk. At the point when tasks are ticket-related, this keeps the tickets from being closed until all tasks inside the ticket are finished.

• Dashboard Reports
• Configurable Help Topics
• Ticket Filters
• Agent Collision Avoidance
• Assign, Transfer, & Referral
• Auto-Responder
• Thread Action
• Service Level Agreements
• Advanced Search

Installation Instructions

Installation using Github

Updating packages on your system to the latest release.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade 

On Ubuntu, you can install Apache Web server from the official apt repository:

sudo apt install apache2 

To start the service manually, run:

 sudo systemctl start apache2

Though the service is enabled to start on boot by default, manually allowing it you have to run:

 sudo systemctl enable apache2

Next, need to install database Server, use the following command to install MySql server

 sudo apt-get update;  sudo apt-get install mysql-server; mysql_secure_installation 

Once, the database server is installed, use the following command to restart MySql server

 sudo service mysql restart 

The next step is the to install PHP on Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install php php-{fpm,pear,imap,apcu,intl,cgi,common,mbstring,net-socket,gd,xml-util,mysql,bcmath}

Now, you have installed all the required software and the next step is to login to mysql server and create osTicket database. Use following command to create database. Change with your database name.

 CREATE DATABASE  

Create a database user called "" with new password. and granted user full access to the database by running the following commands. Change with your desired database user and with your desired password.

 CREATE USER ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY ''; 
 GRANT ALL ON .* TO ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '' WITH GRANT OPTION;
 FLUSH PRIVILEGES; EXIT;

Next, run the commands below to download and extract the downloaded file and move it into a new osTicket root directory.

sudo apt-get install curl wget unzip
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/osTicket/osTicket/releases/latest \
  | grep browser_download_url \
  | grep "browser_download_url" \
  | cut -d '"' -f 4 \
  | wget -i -
ls osTicket
scripts  upload
sudo mv osTicket /var/www/
cd /var/www/osTicket/upload/include
sudo cp ost-sampleconfig.php ost-config.php
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/

Create a database user called "" with new password. and granted user full access to the database by running the following commands. Change with your desired database user and with your desired password.

 CREATE USER ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY ''; 
 GRANT ALL ON .* TO ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '' WITH GRANT OPTION;
 FLUSH PRIVILEGES; EXIT;

Create VirtualHost configuration file for osTicket on Apache configurations directory:

 sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/osticket.conf

Add content:

ServerAdmin This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
DocumentRoot /var/www/osTicket/upload
ServerName osticket.example.com
ServerAlias www.osticket.example.com
Options FollowSymlinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/osticket_error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/osticket_access.log combined

Restart apache2:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Installation using Docker

Pull osTicket Image from hub.docker.com:

docker pull osticket/osticket

Make sure you have a MySQL container running that osTicket can use to store its data.

docker run --name osticket_mysql -d -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret \
-e MYSQL_USER=osticket -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=secret -e MYSQL_DATABASE=osticket mariadb

Now run this image and link the MySQL container.

docker run --name osticket -d --link osticket_mysql:mysql -p 8080:80 osticket/osticket

Once installation is completed then browse to your osTicket staff control panel at http://localhost:8080/scp. Login with default admin user & password:

• username: ostadmin
• password: Admin1

Congrats! You have successfully installed osTicket on Apache.