If you had the experience of installing Bugzilla before this, Mantis definitely is a piece of cake for you. Both Mantis and Bugzilla has several similarities in installation procedures. However, if you are not sure how to install Mantis and you don’t have the experience with Bugzilla, you can refer to my previous post which discussed about Bugzilla installation (Installation of Bugzilla in Ubuntu Environment)

As usual, I did a research on how to install Mantis but it seems Mantis is not as popular as Bugzilla. I only able to find the hint for the first step and as for the rest of the steps, I figured it out by myself. Besides that, as I had mentioned before, the steps are not difficult if you have the experience with Bugzilla before this.

Here are the steps:
1. sudo aptitude install mantis
Package Configuration

WARNING: include path for php has changed!

libphp-adodb is no longer installed in /usr/share/adodb. New
installation path is now /usr/share/php/adodb.

Please update your php.ini file. Maybe you must also change your
web-server configuraton.

Enter Ok.

2. Configuring mantis

mantis must have a database installed and configured before it can be
used. If you like, this can be handled with dbconfig-common.
….
….
Configure database for mantis with dbconfig-common?

Enter Yes.

3. Choose a Password of your database’s administrative user
4. MySQL application password for mantis
5. Password confirmation
6.

Administrator’s password must be changed

By default, the mantis package creates an administrator account. The
password for this account is ‘root’.

It is highly recommended to change this password immediately after
installation is complete.

Installation complete

——————————–

7. Access the site as following:

http://localhost/mantis/login_page.php

8. Check your username and password for login


mysql> show databases;
mysql> use mantis;
mysql> select * from mantis_user_table;


You can check the username and the password by default should be ‘root’.

How to create issues in Mantis

Create Project (Required ‘Administrator’ access)

1) Access to the ‘Manage’ tab
2) Key in your password (it’s a secure page for administrator)
3) Under ‘Manage Projects’, create a new project
Project Name: Testing
Status: Obsolete
View Status: public
Description: testing create project
4) Create a Category ‘User Interface’

Create Custom Fields (Required ‘Administrator’ access)

1) Under ‘Manage Custom Fields’ tab, create a custom field called ‘Mantis ID’ (mantis bug ID)
2) You can choose the following specification for the custom field:
* custom field data type (e.g String, Email, Float, Checkbox)
* possible values
* Default Value
* Regular Expression
* Read Access
* Write Access
* Min. Length
* Max. Length
* Display Only On Advanced Page
* Display When Reporting Issues
* Display When Updating Issues
* Display When Resolving Issues
* Display When Closing Issues
* Required On Report
* Required On Update
* Required On Resolve
* Required On Close

(Why I list out all the details? Because I really feel amazed with the functions that are provided by the Mantis even just for a custom field)

Create issues into ‘Testing’ project

1) Access to the ‘Report Issue’ tab
2) Choose Project ‘Testing’
Choose Category ‘User Interface’
Reproducibility ‘have not tried’
Severity ‘minor’
Priority ‘normal’
Summary: Testing import issue 1
Description: Testing

I personally feel Mantis has a more user-friendly interface compared with Bugzilla and I really like how we can customize the custom fields whether to display during reporting or updating issue and other specifications that we can choose as I had listed above. However, I can’t really judge which one is better because I don’t really spend much time in using Bugzilla. It seems that Bugzilla more popular than Mantis when ‘google’ returns more results for Bugzilla compared with Mantis

Other References:

• Mantis Installation Tutorial – Fedora OS

• Installing the Mantis Bug Tracking System

• Mantis Installation