If you are a frequent web application coder you will no doubt have done endless hours of testing and bug fixing. What this tutorial will hopefully provide you with is a quick and easy way, to setup, and maintain a live Mantis issue tracking system, with an added bonus of utilising the issue reporting application LogDigger. What are they I hear you say, and why use them together. At this point I could ramble on about the two programs but as there sites already do this here are the links:

now you can as you have probably seen on the LogDigger site use LogDigger witha number of issue tracking applications. I have chosen Mantis because its quick and easy to set-up an environment to use it in.

Setting up the environment

Firstly we are going to have to setup a PHP MySQL environment in order for Mantis to work, if you have this already great skip this section if not we can get you up and running really quickly with the very useful package that is WAMP Server LAMP if your on Linux but as I don’t personally use Linux all that much, this tutorial will be based around WAMP.

WAMP

WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP. and it all comes bundled for you in a handy .exe, so all we need do now is go to the following link and download WAMP.

Once Installed on your machine (and if you have chosen C:\ as the install location) you will find a directory called wamp within that there is a directory called www this is where we need to place Mantis. To check if WAMP is working you will see in the bottom right of your screen the following icon wamp working. If like in this image its all white your cooking on gas if not check that you have disabled IIS in your services. When you have disabled IIS restart all services associated with WAMP by clicking the following.

wamprestart

Mantis

So now you should have a fully working WAMP server. if you go to the following Link we can get Mantis downloaded.

with the Mantis zip downloaded. Take that file and unzip it to the following location C:\wamp\www. and rename the directory to mantisbt

now in a your browser of choice navigate to http://localhost/mantisbt you should be presented with the setup page of mantis asking you for multiple settings passwords and usernames i leave to you. but the most important part of this page is the database. If we refer to the image above you will see that there is a link listed called phpMyAdmin. we need to go there now.

phpMyAdmin

Within phpMyAdmin we need to create a new database for Mantis to utilise. This is done by writing the name of the database in the box provided phpMyAminCreateand clicking create. rememember the name and enter this in the Mantis setup page. Run the setup page when all aettings are to your desires. when setup is complete you should have all the fields shown as green.

mantisgreen

We should all now have mantis installed and be able to login. (defauly password is usually administrator and the password is usually root).

follow the simple instructions to create a project within the manage section. This will save time once we have installed LogDigger.

Tomcat

Now this is where some die hards will be telling me i have it wrong and I should be implemement a Tomcat with PHP MySQL integrated, and yes I agree but for this quick setup guide to demonstrate the benefits of these systems I am going to use the quick and easy way two seperate installs.

Get the latest Tomcat from here

I would reccommend the windows installer as this will be relatively painless.  Install this now if you installed in C:\tomcat you will be able to find your webapps directory here C:\tomcat\webapps this directory will be the one that you will be installing LogDigger upon.

LogDigger

We need to get the .war version of LogDigger this will be the quickest and most painless way to install LogDigger find it at the following link

tomcat will automatically unpack the .war file and install it as a web application, the one point I will make would be that the .war file should be renamed in order for the app to have a sensible name, for example I simply removed the version number to leave logdigger.war. Once renamed place the .war file into the webapps directory and let Tomcat work its magic.

now we have logDigger installed we need to set it up and test that it is accessible, to do this try the following. If you have left Tomcat on the default port of 8080 then you can navigate to the following url in your browser of choice. http://localhost:8080/logdigger/ this should bring up logdiggersetupthe LogDigger setup page. follow the 6 easy steps and we are nearly there.

All you need to do now is define a project within LogDigger and if you have done everything up to this point correctly you will see that LogDigger takes all it’s projects from your Mantis installation. Once setup we need to start issue tracking, to do this we need to install the LogDigger browser extension.

Browser Extension

At the time I wrote this there were only two extensions available they are for Internet Explorerand Firefox.

if you go to the link below and download the relevant extension

once installed you should be able to report issues on the fly while