Request Tracker with Docker

This is a complete setup for Request Tracker with docker and docker compose. The production setup assumes you have an external postgres database and an external SMTP server for outgoing emails. A local database server is only started in the dev configuration.

The prebuilt image is available from https://hub.docker.com/r/firefart/requesttracker. The image is rebuilt on a daily basis.

The Request Tracker for Incident Response (RT-IR) Extension is also installed.

Prerequisites

• Docker with the compose plugin
• an external SMTP server to send emails
• an external IMAP server to receive emails from
• an external Postgres database

Instruction

To start use either ./dev.sh which builds the images locally or ./prod.sh which uses the prebuilt ones from docker hub. Before running this you also need to add the required configuration files (see Configuration).

Configuration

The following configuration files need to be present before starting:

• RT_SiteConfig.pm : RTs main configuration file. This needs to be present in the root of the dir. See RT_SiteConfig.pm.example for an example configration and the needed paths and settings for this configuration.
• Caddyfile: The webserver config. See Caddyfile.example for an example.
• ./msmtp/msmtp.conf : config for msmtp (outgoing email). See msmtp.conf.example for an example. The ./msmtp folder is also mounted to /msmtp/ in the container so you can load certificates from the config file.
• crontab : Crontab file that will be run as the RT user. See contab.example for an example. Crontab output will be sent to the MAILTO address (it uses the msmtp config).
• ./getmail/getmailrc: This file configures your E-Mail fetching. See getmailrc.example for an example. getmail configuration docs are available under https://getmail6.org/configuration.html. The configuration options for rt-mailgate which is used to store the emails in request tracker can be viewed under https://docs.bestpractical.com/rt/5.0.7/rt-mailgate.html.

Additional configs:

• ./certs/: This folder should contain all optional certificates needed for caddy
• ./gpg/ : This folder should contain the gpg keyring if used in rt. Be sure to chmod the files to user 1000 with 0600 so RT will not complain.
• ./smime/ : This folder should contain the SMIME certificate if configured in RT
• ./shredder/ : This directory will be used by the shredder functionality https://docs.bestpractical.com/rt/latest/RT/Shredder.html so the backups are stored on the host

For output of your crontabs you can use the /cron directory so the output will be available on the host.

In the default configuration all output from RT, caddy, getmail and msmtp is available via docker logs (or docker compose -f ... logs).

Webserver

The setup uses Caddy as a webserver. You can find an example configuration in Caddyfile.example. Caddy provides features like auto https with lets encrypt and more stuff that makes it easy to set up. You can find the Caddy documentation here https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile.

Feel free to modify the config to your needs like auto https, certificate based authentication, basic authentication and so on. Just be sure the mailgateway host under port :8080 is untouched and the main host contains a block for the unauth API path, otherwise everyone with access to your RT instance can create emails without the need to log in first.

Create Certificate

If you don't want to use the auto https feature (for example in dev) you can provide your own certificates.

Create a self signed certificate:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout ./certs/priv.pem -out ./certs/pub.pem -days 3650 -nodes

Init database

This initializes a fresh database. This is needed on the first run.

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-setup-database --action init'

You need to restart the rt service after this step as it crashes if the database is not initialized.

DEV

Hint: Add --skip-create in dev as the database is created by docker

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-setup-database --action init --skip-create'

Upgrade steps

Upgrade Database

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-setup-database --action upgrade --upgrade-from 4.4.4'

Fix data inconsistencies

Run multiple times with the --resolve switch until no errors occur

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-validator --check --resolve'

RT-IR

You can simply enable RT-IR in your RT_SiteConfig.pm by including Plugin('RT::IR');. Please refer to the docs for additional install or upgrade steps.

To initialize the database (ONLY ON THE FIRST RUN!!!! and only after rt is fully set up)

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-setup-database --action insert --skip-create --datafile /opt/rtir/initialdata'

To upgrade

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml run --rm rt bash -c 'cd /opt/rt5 && perl ./sbin/rt-setup-database --action upgrade --skip-create --datadir /opt/rtir/upgrade --package RT::IR --ext-version 5.0.4'

Restart docker setup after all steps to fully load RT-IR (just run ./restart_prod.sh).

Deprecated features

• NGINX: The old setup used nginx for the webserver. If you want to upgrade you need to migrate your nginx config to a Caddy config
• compose profiles: Previously there were compose profile to also include dozzle for viewing logs and pgadmin to interact with the database. Both tools are now removed and pgadmin is only available in dev mode. If you still need pgadmin you can easily spin it up using docker compose.