Talk:DebianSqueezeInstallGuide/@comment-216.251.135.194-20130302101228

Okay got it installed. I am really dissapointed in the so called users here.  Not a single person has mentioned that if you are installing a clean install of RT4 and your db is on another server that has to be manually configured that RT will NOT work until you populate (initialize) the database. Dbconf seems to only want to deal with a local db, which is normal.  No sane db admin would let an unknown tool have root access to their db server anyway.

Instead, RT expects a database created on the Postgres server an all the tables and defaults populated and ready to go.  The web interface has no facility for this (and rightly so).  RT has scripts to initialize the database, the easiest way is rt-setup-database-4 --action init.  Running this script is pretty nice because the error messages are sane.  It will prompt you for the correct permissions in postgres, so you will have to setup pg_hba.conf properly manually, but after a little back and forth between psql (in case you need to recreate the db / user) and editing pg_hba.conf you should be able to get it.

You can also import a sample database, if you are on debian squeeze as follows: rt-setup-database --action coredata --action insert --datafile /usr/share/request-tracker4/etc/initialdata.  I never bothered, I want to start with a totally empty and clean RT.  If I find I need to use it, I will post an udpate here.

On the postgres side, you can 'su - postgres', start 'psql', and just do a simple:

CREATE USER username PASSWORD password;

CRATE DATABASE dbname OWNER username;

For those for whom the above instructions worked, they worked because dbconfig probably setup postgres for you, asked you for your postgres root pass and ran the init script it self.

I hope this helps other people trying to get a decent RT setup going.  It is really one of the best ticket trackers out there.  I cannot find anything better.