Learn how to - Install OTRS (OTOBO) Ticketing system on CentOS 8

Felix Williams CentOS Linux Tutorials Management June 6, 2023

Learn how to – Install OTRS (OTOBO) Ticketing system on CentOS 8.

OTOBO is a smart, agile, and flexible communication platform and service management suite based on the ((OTRS)) Community Edition which was declared end of life (EOL) at the end of December 2020. OTOBO contains an admin dashboard, agent portal, and customer portal used for Customer Service, Help Desk, and IT Service Management. This software is created to be extensible and good integration with other systems. In this guide we walk you through the installation steps of OTOBO OTRS Ticketing system on CentOS 8 Linux system.

OTOBO can be used to process a few tickets per month or to process hundreds of tickets per day. Hardware requirements is highly dictated by the desired use case. The storage requirement also depends on the number of tickets and size of attachments. Software requirements for running (OTOBO) OTRS are:

Perl

Perl 5.16.0 or higher
Perl packages listed by /opt/otrs/bin/otrs.CheckEnvironment.pl console command

Web Servers

Apache2
nginx
Any other web server that can be used as a reverse proxy

Databases

MySQL 5.7 or higher
MariaDB 10.2 or higher
PostgreSQL 9.2 or higher
Oracle 10g or higher

Step 1: Update System

Start the installation by updating your CentOS 8 system to the latest release:

sudo yum -y update

Wait for the system packages to be upgraded then reboot your system if kernel related updates were made.

Step 2: Install Docker on CentOS 8

We’ll use Docker method to run OTOBO (OTRS) on CentOS 8 system. Since Docker is not part of CentOS server installation we’ll need to manually install it.

Before you install Docker Engine for the first time on a new host machine, you need to set up the Docker repository:

sudo yum install -y yum-utils
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo

Afterward, install the latest version of Docker Engine and containerd:

sudo yum -y install iptables docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

Start Docker service after installation:

sudo systemctl start docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

Docker service should return green status – running:

$ systemctl status docker
● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Tue 2021-04-06 10:47:25 UTC; 5s ago
     Docs: https://docs.docker.com
 Main PID: 35953 (dockerd)
    Tasks: 10
   Memory: 44.1M
   CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service
           └─35953 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/containerd.sock

Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.415220323Z" level=info msg="[graphdriver] using prior storage driver: over>
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.416922290Z" level=warning msg="Your kernel does not support cgroup blkio w>
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.416948751Z" level=warning msg="Your kernel does not support cgroup blkio w>
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.417204840Z" level=info msg="Loading containers: start."
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.570487095Z" level=info msg="Default bridge (docker0) is assigned with an I>
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.635698877Z" level=info msg="Loading containers: done."
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.661056788Z" level=info msg="Docker daemon" commit=363e9a8 graphdriver(s)=o>
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com dockerd[35953]: time="2021-04-06T10:47:25.661222532Z" level=info msg="Daemon has completed initialization"
Apr 06 10:47:25 centos.hirebestengineers.com systemd[1]: Started Docker Application Container Engine.

Step 3: Install Docker Compose on CentOS 8

Follow our guide in the link to install Docker Compose on CentOS 8:

Install Docker Compose on Linux

Confirm installation by checking software verision:

$ docker-compose version
docker-compose version 1.28.6, build 5db8d86f
docker-py version: 4.4.4
CPython version: 3.7.10
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.1.0l  10 Sep 2019

Step 4: Deploy OTRS (OTOBO) on CentOS 8 using Docker

With Docker and Docker compose installed we can the install OTOBO on CentOS 8 server.

Install git:

sudo yum -y install git

Pull the latest Otobo code:

$ git clone https://github.com/RotherOSS/otobo-docker.git

Cloning into 'otobo-docker'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 244, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (244/244), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (131/131), done.
remote: Total 473 (delta 126), reused 189 (delta 83), pack-reused 229
Receiving objects: 100% (473/473), 91.76 KiB | 15.29 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (269/269), done.

Confirm if the folder contain the files we need:

$ ls otobo-docker
docker-compose  etc  LICENSE  README.md  scripts

The Docker Compose configuration file .env allows you to manage your installation of OTOBO

$ ls otobo-docker/.docker_compose_env_http*
otobo-docker/.docker_compose_env_http   otobo-docker/.docker_compose_env_https_custom_nginx
otobo-docker/.docker_compose_env_https  otobo-docker/.docker_compose_env_https_selenium

If the OTOBO web application is planned to be accessed via HTTPS, then please use .docker_compose_env_https. Access via HTTPS is the recommended mode of operation. If HTTPS is not required then use .docker_compose_env_http as the starting point.

cd otobo-docker
cp -p .docker_compose_env_http .env # or .docker_compose_env_https for HTTP

Configure the password for the database admin user

Change the following setting inside your .env file:

$ vim .env
OTOBO_DB_ROOT_PASSWORD=<your_secret_password>

The database admin user is needed to create the database user otobo and the database schema otobo. OTOBO will actually use the dedicated database user otobo.

Start the Docker containers with Docker Compose

When done with the configurations start the Docker containers using:

$ docker-compose up --detach
.....
Digest: sha256:b0135c94e866953af1db5be72759c5f68f25f756d2673cbe21cbca5ae54adddf
Status: Downloaded newer image for rotheross/otobo:latest
Creating otobo_redis_1   ... done
Creating otobo_elastic_1 ... done
Creating otobo_db_1      ... done
Creating otobo_web_1     ... done
Creating otobo_daemon_1  ... done

Check if containers were started successfully:

$ docker-compose ps
     Name                    Command               State          Ports
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
otobo_daemon_1    /opt/otobo_install/entrypo ...   Up
otobo_db_1        docker-entrypoint.sh --max ...   Up      3306/tcp
otobo_elastic_1   /tini -- /usr/local/bin/do ...   Up      9200/tcp, 9300/tcp
otobo_redis_1     docker-entrypoint.sh redis ...   Up      6379/tcp
otobo_web_1       /opt/otobo_install/entrypo ...   Up      0.0.0.0:80->5000/tcp

Listing used volumes:

$ docker volume ls
DRIVER    VOLUME NAME
local     otobo_elasticsearch_data
local     otobo_mariadb_data
local     otobo_opt_otobo
local     otobo_redis_data