Install Zammad Ticketing System on Debian 10

February 3, 2021

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Welcome to our tutorial on how to install Zammad ticketing system on Debian 10. According to Zammad documentation page, “Zammad is a web based open source helpdesk/customer support system with many features to manage customer communication via several channels like telephone, facebook, twitter, chat and emails”.

Read about Zammad Ticketing system features on its features page, link provided below.

Zammad Ticketing system features

Install Zammad Ticketing System on Debian 10

Prerequisites

There are a number of requirements that your system must meet (as of this writing) before you can install Zammad Ticketing system on Debian 10.

Software Requirements

Ruby 2.6.6 for Zammad v3.4.1+: Zammad is written in Ruby and Java and hence Ruby is required.
Relational Database Management systems (RDBMS) for storing content. The supported RDMS systems;
- MySQL 5.6+
- MariaDB 10.0+
- PostgreSQL 9.1+ (recommended and is supported by default).

Reverse Proxy to deliver the static content of your application:
- Nginx 1.3+
- Apache 2.2+

Elasticsearch (optional but highly recommended) to make search faster and to support advanced features like reports or searching by email attachment contents. Zammad v3.4+ is compatible with Elasticsearch 5.5–7.7.

Hardware Requirements

Please refer to Zammad hardware requirements page.

Install Zammad Ticketing System on Debian 10

Configure Locales in Debian

In this tutorial, we will be installing Zammad with PostgreSQL which is supported by default.

As such, if you are using PostgreSQL database backend, you need to enable UTF-8 locale.

To check if UTF-8 local is enabled, run the locale command from terminal as shown below.

locale

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If you do not see such a line from the above output;

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The you need to generate and update the locales.

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

This will update the /etc/default/locale file with the set LANG environment variable.

Install Elasticsearch on Debian

Zammad v3.4+ is compatible with Elasticsearch 5.5–7.7. Hence, let us install Elasticsearch 7.7 on Debian.

Install the Elasticsearch repository signing key;

apt install gnupg2 -y

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch --no-check-certificate | sudo apt-key add -

Install Elasticsearch repo;

echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list

Install Elasticsearch 7.7 on Debian;

apt update

apt install elasticsearch=7.7.1

Install Zammad Ticketing System on Debian 10

Install Zammad repo lists on Debian

wget -qO- https://dl.packager.io/srv/zammad/zammad/key | sudo apt-key add -

wget -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/zammad.list https://dl.packager.io/srv/zammad/zammad/stable/installer/debian/10.repo

Update package cache;

apt update

Next, install Zammad ticketing system on Debian 10 and all the other required packages.

The command below installs Zammad 3.6.0, which is the current stable release as of this writing?

apt install zammad

As the installation completes, you will see such an output;

...
# Starting Zammad
# Creating webserver bootstart
Synchronizing state of nginx.service with SysV service script with /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install.
Executing: /lib/systemd/systemd-sysv-install enable nginx
# Restarting webserver nginx
####################################################################################

Add your fully qualified domain name or public IP to servername directive of
nginx, if this installation is done on a remote server. You have to change:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/zammad.conf and restart nginx process.
Otherwise just open http://localhost/ in your browser to start using Zammad.

####################################################################################
...

Managing Zammad Services

Zammad

systemctl status zammad
systemctl stop zammad
systemctl start zammad
systemctl restart zammad
systemctl enable zammad

Only web application server

systemctl status zammad-web
systemctl stop zammad-web
systemctl start zammad-web
systemctl restart zammad-web

Only worker process

systemctl status zammad-worker
systemctl stop zammad-worker
systemctl start zammad-worker
systemctl restart zammad-worker

Only websocket server

systemctl status zammad-websocket
systemctl stop zammad-websocket
systemctl start zammad-websocket
systemctl restart zammad-websocket

Configure Elasticsearch for Zammad

Next, configure Elasticsearch search engine for Zammad.

Running Elasticsearch

We have already installed Elasticsearch 7.7.1. Thus, you can start and enable it to run on system boot by running the command below;

systemctl enable --now elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is now running with the default settings.

You can verify by running the command below;

curl localhost:9200

{
  "name" : "debian",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "cluster_uuid" : "jNyydGm3TjSaaRp1EcvCxg",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "7.7.1",
    "build_flavor" : "default",
    "build_type" : "deb",
    "build_hash" : "ad56dce891c901a492bb1ee393f12dfff473a423",
    "build_date" : "2020-05-28T16:30:01.040088Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "8.5.1",
    "minimum_wire_compatibility_version" : "6.8.0",
    "minimum_index_compatibility_version" : "6.0.0-beta1"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

Install Elasticsearch Ingest Plugin

The ingest plugin extends Elasticsearch by providing additional ingest node capabilities.

To install the plugin, run the command below;

/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-plugin install ingest-attachment

-> Installing ingest-attachment
-> Downloading ingest-attachment from elastic
[=================================================] 100%   
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@     WARNING: plugin requires additional permissions     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
* java.lang.RuntimePermission accessClassInPackage.sun.java2d.cmm.kcms
* java.lang.RuntimePermission accessDeclaredMembers
* java.lang.RuntimePermission getClassLoader
* java.lang.reflect.ReflectPermission suppressAccessChecks
* java.security.SecurityPermission createAccessControlContext
* java.security.SecurityPermission insertProvider
* java.security.SecurityPermission putProviderProperty.BC
See http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/security/permissions.html
for descriptions of what these permissions allow and the associated risks.

Continue with installation? [y/N]y
-> Installed ingest-attachment

Tune Elasticsearch

Increase the virtual memory map count;

echo vm.max_map_count=262144 >> /etc/sysctl.conf

sysctl -p

Increase the maximum size of an HTTP request body (default is 100MB).

echo "http.max_content_length: 400mb" >> /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml

Restart Elasticsearch

systemctl restart elasticsearch

Configure Zammad to use Elasticsearch

Run the command below to define Zammad Elasticsearch URL, rebuild index, adjust the index namespacing as well as the file attachment indexing rules.

zammad run rails r "Setting.set('es_url', 'http://localhost:9200')"

zammad run rake searchindex:rebuild

zammad run rails r "Setting.set('es_attachment_ignore', [ '.png', '.jpg', '.jpeg', '.mpeg', '.mpg', '.mov', '.bin', '.exe', '.box', '.mbox' ] )"

zammad run rails r "Setting.set('es_attachment_max_size_in_mb', 50)"

Install Postfix for Zammad Email Notifications

To have Zammad deliver email notifications, you can install postfix;

apt install postfix

Accessing Zammad Interface

To access Zammad web interface, you need to update some few Nginx web server configurations.

Actually, the only change we can make is to make the site available and accessible from outside by changing the value of the server_name to your resolvable fully qualified domain name;

vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/zammad.conf

server {
    listen 80;

    # replace 'localhost' with your fqdn if you want to use zammad from remote
    #server_name localhost;
    server_name helpdesk.kifarunix-demo.com;
...

Save the file and exit.

Check Nginx syntax and restart it if all is well;