unibuc-ditc / osticket

Open source ticketing software, used for the Helpdesk project.

osTicket - custom version

This is a customized version of osTicket, adapted for the University of Bucharest's needs.

• Contributing instructions
• Deployment instructions
• The original README can be found here.

osticket's Issues

Send an e-mail to collaborators when they're added to an existing ticket

Right now, when we add a collaborator to an existing ticket, they don't receive any sort of notification e-mail telling them this. They'll receive e-mails only after new messages are added.

We should try to configure or update the app so that it generates and sends an informational message when you're added as a collaborator to a new ticket.

Upgrade to osTicket 1.18

We should consider rebasing our fork onto the osTicket 1.18 stable branch and then updating the staging and production instances.

Configure custom error pages for web server

Right now, if the user tries to access an inexistent URL or if there's some internal server error, the generic Apache 2 white error pages show up. We could instead configure some custom, branded error pages, with more user-friendly information.

See this tutorial for steps on how to do this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-apache-to-use-custom-error-pages-on-ubuntu-14-04

Set up Elastic APM PHP agent for app monitoring

This will help us determine remotely if there are any problems related to the functioning of the app, diagnose bugs, and so on.

General installation and configuration guide for APM agent: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/php/current/index.html

How to install the Elastic APM agent in a Docker container (might need to adapt it a bit): https://gist.github.com/ssi-anik/84b45774df9ffadeb5179d41bb0fb699

We will also want to configure the Elastic APM agent for our Helpdesk app, to display the two instances (staging and production) differently.

Enable HTTP/2 protocol support

The HTTP/2 protocol is a powerful improvement over the initial version of the HTTP protocol, which should lead to much faster connection speeds for our users.

I've found this blog post describing how to enable HTTP/2 support in Apache 2 running inside a Docker container. I haven't tried out the steps yet, but this GitHub issue seems to suggest that it might not be possible (or it might be very hard) to get this feature working correctly on Apache. The comments there instead propose switching to NGINX with PHP-FPM for better H2 support. If this is the case, this is a starting point for an NGINX config file for hosting osTicket.

Set up a cron job to regularly process osTicket's background jobs

Due to the way PHP works, osTicket cannot regularly run background jobs at a specified time interval unless there is some HTTP request happening in this time period.

One solution described in the official documentation is to set up a cron job to regularly poll the /api/cron.php route, which will take care of processing the background tasks.

Since we package up and deploy our osTicket instances as Docker containers, it shouldn't be very hard to modify the Docker images and set up this functionality.

Upgrade the staging/production databases to MariaDB 11

We should follow the official instructions on how to upgrade to a new major version of the MariaDB database system.

Don't mark tickets as overdue when they're in the "Waiting" state

We defined a custom "Waiting" (În așteptare) ticket state on our production instance, in order to mark tickets which should stay open, but should not be marked as "Overdue" because they're delayed due to causes beyond our control (i.e. waiting for a response from the client, waiting on an external contractor to act). Unfortunately, osTicket still processes these tickets as if they are just in the regular "Open" state and marks them as "Overdue" after their due date expires. We would like to prevent this behavior.

Change send reply form title when there are no other replies on the ticket

After opening a new ticket, users are redirected to it and they see this form:

We should change the title of this box:

• It should be Trimite informații adiționale (dacă este necesar) if the ticket has no replies yet (so it's newly created/unallocated)
• Should stick to Trimite un răspuns otherwise