The Bugzilla Guide - 2.22.

2 Release

The Bugzilla Team

The Bugzilla Guide - 2.22.2 Release
by The Bugzilla Team

Published 2007-02-02

This is the documentation for Bugzilla, a bug-tracking system from mozilla.org. Bugzilla is an enterprise-class piece
of software that tracks millions of bugs and issues for hundreds of organizations around the world.
The most current version of this document can always be found on the Bugzilla Documentation Page
(http://www.bugzilla.org/documentation.html).
Table of Contents
1. About This Guide......................................................................................................................................................1
1.1. Copyright Information....................................................................................................................................1
1.2. Disclaimer ......................................................................................................................................................1
1.3. New Versions..................................................................................................................................................1
1.4. Credits ............................................................................................................................................................2
1.5. Document Conventions ..................................................................................................................................2
2. Installing Bugzilla .....................................................................................................................................................4
2.1. Installation......................................................................................................................................................4
2.1.1. Perl.....................................................................................................................................................4
2.1.2. Database Engine ................................................................................................................................5
2.1.2.1. MySQL..................................................................................................................................5
2.1.2.2. PostgreSQL ...........................................................................................................................5
2.1.3. Web Server.........................................................................................................................................5
2.1.4. Bugzilla..............................................................................................................................................5
2.1.5. Perl Modules......................................................................................................................................6
2.1.5.1. DBD::mysql ..........................................................................................................................7
2.1.5.2. Template Toolkit (2.10).........................................................................................................8
2.1.5.3. GD (1.20) ..............................................................................................................................8
2.1.5.4. Chart::Base (1.0) ...................................................................................................................8
2.1.5.5. GD::Graph (any) ...................................................................................................................8
2.1.5.6. GD::Text::Align (any) ...........................................................................................................8
2.1.5.7. XML::Twig (any) ..................................................................................................................8
2.1.5.8. PatchReader (0.9.4)...............................................................................................................8
2.1.6. Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) ..............................................................................................................9
2.2. Configuration..................................................................................................................................................9
2.2.1. localconfig..........................................................................................................................................9
2.2.2. Database Server ...............................................................................................................................10
2.2.2.1. Bugzilla Database Schema..................................................................................................10
2.2.2.2. MySQL................................................................................................................................10
2.2.2.3. PostgreSQL .........................................................................................................................12
2.2.3. checksetup.pl ...................................................................................................................................13
2.2.4. Web server .......................................................................................................................................13
2.2.4.1. Apache httpd .......................................................................................................................13
2.2.4.2. Microsoft Internet Information Services.............................................................................14
2.2.5. Bugzilla............................................................................................................................................15
2.3. Optional Additional Configuration...............................................................................................................15
2.3.1. Bug Graphs ......................................................................................................................................15
2.3.2. Dependency Charts ..........................................................................................................................16
2.3.3. The Whining Cron ...........................................................................................................................16
2.3.4. Whining ...........................................................................................................................................16
2.3.5. Patch Viewer ....................................................................................................................................17
2.3.6. LDAP Authentication ......................................................................................................................17
2.3.7. Serving Alternate Formats with the right MIME type.....................................................................19
2.4. Multiple Bugzilla databases with a single installation .................................................................................19
2.5. OS-Specific Installation Notes .....................................................................................................................20

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 2.5.1. Microsoft Windows .........................................................................................................................20
2.5.1.1. Win32 Perl...........................................................................................................................20
2.5.1.2. Perl Modules on Win32.......................................................................................................20
2.5.1.3. Code changes required to run on Win32.............................................................................21
2.5.1.4. Serving the web pages.........................................................................................................21
2.5.1.5. Sending Email .....................................................................................................................21
2.5.2. Mac OS X ........................................................................................................................................21
2.5.2.1. Sendmail..............................................................................................................................21
2.5.2.2. Libraries & Perl Modules on Mac OS X.............................................................................21
2.5.3. Linux-Mandrake 8.0 ........................................................................................................................22
2.6. UNIX (non-root) Installation Notes .............................................................................................................22
2.6.1. Introduction......................................................................................................................................23
2.6.2. MySQL ............................................................................................................................................23
2.6.2.1. Running MySQL as Non-Root ...........................................................................................23
2.6.3. Perl...................................................................................................................................................24
2.6.4. Perl Modules....................................................................................................................................25
2.6.4.1. The Independant Method ....................................................................................................25
2.6.4.2. The Mixed Method..............................................................................................................25
2.6.5. HTTP Server ....................................................................................................................................27
2.6.5.1. Running Apache as Non-Root ............................................................................................27
2.6.6. Bugzilla............................................................................................................................................27
3. Administering Bugzilla...........................................................................................................................................29
3.1. Bugzilla Configuration .................................................................................................................................29
3.2. User Administration .....................................................................................................................................31
3.2.1. Creating the Default User ................................................................................................................31
3.2.2. Managing Other Users.....................................................................................................................32
3.2.2.1. Searching for existing users ................................................................................................32
3.2.2.2. Creating new users ..............................................................................................................32
3.2.2.3. Modifying Users .................................................................................................................33
3.2.2.4. Deleting Users.....................................................................................................................34
3.2.2.5. Impersonating Users ...........................................................................................................34
3.3. Classifications...............................................................................................................................................34
3.4. Products........................................................................................................................................................35
3.5. Components..................................................................................................................................................35
3.6. Versions ........................................................................................................................................................35
3.7. Milestones ....................................................................................................................................................36
3.8. Flags .............................................................................................................................................................36
3.8.1. A Simple Example...........................................................................................................................36
3.8.2. About Flags......................................................................................................................................37
3.8.2.1. Values ..................................................................................................................................37
3.8.3. Using flag requests...........................................................................................................................37
3.8.4. Two Types of Flags..........................................................................................................................38
3.8.4.1. Attachment Flags ................................................................................................................38
3.8.4.2. Bug Flags ............................................................................................................................38
3.8.5. Administering Flags.........................................................................................................................38
3.8.5.1. Creating a Flag ....................................................................................................................39
3.8.5.2. Deleting a Flag ....................................................................................................................41

iv
 3.8.5.3. Editing a Flag ......................................................................................................................41
3.9. Legal Values .................................................................................................................................................41
3.9.1. Viewing/Editing legal values ...........................................................................................................41
3.9.2. Deleting legal values........................................................................................................................41
3.10. Voting .........................................................................................................................................................42
3.11. Quips ..........................................................................................................................................................42
3.12. Groups and Group Security........................................................................................................................42
3.12.1. Creating Groups.............................................................................................................................43
3.12.2. Assigning Users to Groups ............................................................................................................44
3.12.3. Assigning Group Controls to Products ..........................................................................................44
3.12.4. Common Applications of Group Controls.....................................................................................44
3.12.4.1. General User Access With Security Group.......................................................................45
3.12.4.2. General User Access With A Security Product.................................................................45
3.12.4.3. Product Isolation With Common Group ...........................................................................45
3.13. Upgrading to New Releases .......................................................................................................................46
3.13.1. Version Definitions ........................................................................................................................46
3.13.2. Upgrading - Methods and Procedure.............................................................................................46
3.13.2.1. Upgrading using CVS .......................................................................................................47
3.13.2.2. Upgrading using the tarball...............................................................................................48
3.13.2.3. Upgrading using patches ...................................................................................................49
3.13.3. Completing Your Upgrade.............................................................................................................49
4. Bugzilla Security .....................................................................................................................................................50
4.1. Operating System .........................................................................................................................................50
4.1.1. TCP/IP Ports ....................................................................................................................................50
4.1.2. System User Accounts.....................................................................................................................50
4.1.3. The chroot Jail...............................................................................................................................50
4.2. MySQL.........................................................................................................................................................50
4.2.1. The MySQL System Account..........................................................................................................51
4.2.2. The MySQL “root” and “anonymous” Users ..................................................................................51
4.2.3. Network Access ...............................................................................................................................51
4.3. Web server ....................................................................................................................................................52
4.3.1. Disabling Remote Access to Bugzilla Configuration Files .............................................................52
4.3.2. Using mod_throttle to Prevent a DOS........................................................................................53
4.4. Bugzilla ........................................................................................................................................................53
4.4.1. Prevent users injecting malicious Javascript....................................................................................53
5. Using Bugzilla..........................................................................................................................................................54
5.1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................54
5.2. Create a Bugzilla Account............................................................................................................................54
5.3. Anatomy of a Bug ........................................................................................................................................54
5.4. Life Cycle of a Bug ......................................................................................................................................56
5.5. Searching for Bugs .......................................................................................................................................56
5.5.1. Boolean Charts.................................................................................................................................57
5.5.1.1. Pronoun Substitution...........................................................................................................57
5.5.1.2. Negation ..............................................................................................................................57
5.5.1.3. Multiple Charts ...................................................................................................................58
5.5.2. Quicksearch .....................................................................................................................................58
5.5.3. Bug Lists..........................................................................................................................................58

v
 5.5.4. Adding individual bugs from bug lists.............................................................................................59
5.6. Filing Bugs ...................................................................................................................................................59
5.6.1. Reporting a New Bug ......................................................................................................................59
5.6.2. Clone an Existing Bug .....................................................................................................................60
5.7. Attachments..................................................................................................................................................60
5.7.1. Patch Viewer ....................................................................................................................................61
5.7.1.1. Viewing Patches in Patch Viewer........................................................................................61
5.7.1.2. Seeing the Difference Between Two Patches......................................................................61
5.7.1.3. Getting More Context in a Patch.........................................................................................61
5.7.1.4. Collapsing and Expanding Sections of a Patch...................................................................61
5.7.1.5. Linking to a Section of a Patch ...........................................................................................62
5.7.1.6. Going to Bonsai and LXR...................................................................................................62
5.7.1.7. Creating a Unified Diff........................................................................................................62
5.8. Hints and Tips ..............................................................................................................................................62
5.8.1. Autolinkification ..............................................................................................................................62
5.8.2. Comments ........................................................................................................................................62
5.8.3. Dependency Tree .............................................................................................................................63
5.9. Time Tracking Information ..........................................................................................................................63
5.10. User Preferences.........................................................................................................................................63
5.10.1. Account Preferences ......................................................................................................................63
5.10.2. General Preferences .......................................................................................................................63
5.10.3. Email Preferences ..........................................................................................................................64
5.10.4. Permissions ....................................................................................................................................65
5.11. Reports and Charts .....................................................................................................................................65
5.11.1. Reports...........................................................................................................................................65
5.11.2. Charts.............................................................................................................................................66
5.11.2.1. Creating Charts .................................................................................................................66
5.11.2.2. Creating New Data Sets ....................................................................................................67
5.12. Flags ...........................................................................................................................................................67
5.13. Whining......................................................................................................................................................67
5.13.1. The Event.......................................................................................................................................68
5.13.2. Whining Schedule..........................................................................................................................68
5.13.3. Whining Queries............................................................................................................................69
5.13.4. Saving Your Changes.....................................................................................................................70
6. Customising Bugzilla ..............................................................................................................................................71
6.1. Template Customization...............................................................................................................................71
6.1.1. Template Directory Structure ..........................................................................................................71
6.1.2. Choosing a Customization Method .................................................................................................71
6.1.3. How To Edit Templates ...................................................................................................................72
6.1.4. Template Formats and Types ...........................................................................................................72
6.1.5. Particular Templates ........................................................................................................................73
6.1.6. Configuring Bugzilla to Detect the User’s Language ......................................................................74
6.2. Template Hooks............................................................................................................................................75
6.3. Customizing Who Can Change What ..........................................................................................................77
6.3.1. Modification in UserInGroup()........................................................................................................78
6.4. Modifying Your Running System ................................................................................................................78
6.5. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools ................................................................................................79

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 6.5.1. Bonsai ..............................................................................................................................................79
6.5.2. CVS..................................................................................................................................................79
6.5.3. Perforce SCM ..................................................................................................................................79
6.5.4. Subversion .......................................................................................................................................79
6.5.5. Tinderbox/Tinderbox2 .....................................................................................................................80
A. The Bugzilla FAQ ...................................................................................................................................................81
B. Troubleshooting ......................................................................................................................................................95
B.1. General Advice ............................................................................................................................................95
B.2. The Apache webserver is not serving Bugzilla pages .................................................................................95
B.3. I installed a Perl module, but checksetup.pl claims it’s not installed!...................................................95
B.4. DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed .................................................................................................................96
B.5. cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue) .................................................................................................................96
B.6. Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_NOINHERIT ........................................................................96
B.7. Everybody is constantly being forced to relogin .........................................................................................97
B.8. Some users are constantly being forced to relogin ......................................................................................98
B.9. index.cgi doesn’t show up unless specified in the URL..........................................................................98
B.10. checksetup.pl reports "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server..." ...............99
C. Contrib ..................................................................................................................................................................100
C.1. Command-line Search Interface ................................................................................................................100
C.2. Command-line ’Send Unsent Bug-mail’ tool ............................................................................................100
D. Manual Installation of Perl Modules..................................................................................................................101
D.1. Instructions ................................................................................................................................................101
D.2. Download Locations..................................................................................................................................101
D.3. Optional Modules ......................................................................................................................................104
E. GNU Free Documentation License .....................................................................................................................106
0. Preamble........................................................................................................................................................106
1. Applicability and Definition..........................................................................................................................106
2. Verbatim Copying .........................................................................................................................................107
3. Copying in Quantity ......................................................................................................................................107
4. Modifications.................................................................................................................................................108
5. Combining Documents..................................................................................................................................109
6. Collections of Documents .............................................................................................................................109
7. Aggregation with Independent Works...........................................................................................................109
8. Translation.....................................................................................................................................................110
9. Termination ...................................................................................................................................................110
10. Future Revisions of this License .................................................................................................................110
How to use this License for your documents ....................................................................................................110
Glossary .....................................................................................................................................................................112

vii
List of Figures
5-1. Lifecycle of a Bugzilla Bug...................................................................................................................................56

List of Examples
4-1. Assigning the MySQL “root” User a Password ....................................................................................................51
4-2. Disabling the MySQL “anonymous” User ............................................................................................................51
4-3. Disabling Networking in MySQL .........................................................................................................................51
B-1. Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs for sharing login cookies..........................................................................98
B-2. Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs to restrict the login cookie .......................................................................98

viii
Chapter 1. About This Guide

1.1. Copyright Information

This document is copyright (c) 2000-2007 by the various Bugzilla contributors who wrote it.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-
Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in Appendix E.

If you have any questions regarding this document, its copyright, or publishing this document in non-electronic form,
please contact the Bugzilla Team.

1.2. Disclaimer
No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted. Follow the instructions herein at your own risk. This
document may contain errors and inaccuracies that may damage your system, cause your partner to leave you, your
boss to fire you, your cats to pee on your furniture and clothing, and global thermonuclear war. Proceed with caution.
Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements, with the exception of the term
"GNU/Linux". We wholeheartedly endorse the use of GNU/Linux; it is an extremely versatile, stable, and robust
operating system that offers an ideal operating environment for Bugzilla.
Although the Bugzilla development team has taken great care to ensure that all exploitable bugs have been fixed,
security holes surely exist in any piece of code. Great care should be taken both in the installation and usage of this
software. The Bugzilla development team members assume no liability for your use of Bugzilla. You have the source
code, and are responsible for auditing it yourself to ensure your security needs are met.

1.3. New Versions

This is the 2.22.2 version of The Bugzilla Guide. It is so named to match the current version of Bugzilla.
The latest version of this guide can always be found at http://www.bugzilla.org, or checked out via
CVS by following the Mozilla CVS (http://www.mozilla.org/cvs.html) instructions and check out the
mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/docs/ subtree. However, you should read the version which came with the
Bugzilla release you are using.
The Bugzilla Guide, or a section of it, is also available in the following languages: French
(http://www.traduc.org/docs/guides/lecture/bugzilla/), German (http://bugzilla-de.sourceforge.net/docs/html/),
Japanese (http://www.bugzilla.jp/docs/2.18/). Note that these may be outdated or not up to date.
In addition, there are Bugzilla template localisation projects in the following languages. They may
have translated documentation available: Arabic (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-ar/), Belarusian
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-be/), Bulgarian (http://openfmi.net/projects/mozilla-bg/), Brazilian
Portuguese (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-br/), Chinese (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-cn/),
French (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-fr/), German (http://germzilla.wurblzap.net/), Italian
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-it/), Japanese (http://www.bugzilla.jp/about/jp.html), Korean

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 Chapter 1. About This Guide

(http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-kr/), Russian (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-ru/) and Spanish

(http://sourceforge.net/projects/bugzilla-es/).
If you would like to volunteer to translate the Guide into additional languages, please contact Dave Miller
(mailto:[email protected]).

1.4. Credits
The people listed below have made enormous contributions to the creation of this Guide, through their writing, ded-
icated hacking efforts, numerous e-mail and IRC support sessions, and overall excellent contribution to the Bugzilla
community:

Matthew P. Barnson <[email protected]>

for the Herculean task of pulling together the Bugzilla Guide and shepherding it to 2.14.

Terry Weissman <[email protected]>

for initially writing Bugzilla and creating the README upon which the UNIX installation documentation is
largely based.

Tara Hernandez <[email protected]>

for keeping Bugzilla development going strong after Terry left mozilla.org and for running landfill.

Dave Lawrence <[email protected]>

for providing insight into the key differences between Red Hat’s customized Bugzilla.

Dawn Endico <[email protected]>

for being a hacker extraordinaire and putting up with Matthew’s incessant questions and arguments on
irc.mozilla.org in #mozwebtools

Jacob Steenhagen <[email protected]>

for taking over documentation during the 2.17 development period.

Dave Miller <[email protected]>

for taking over as project lead when Tara stepped down and continually pushing for the documentation to be the
best it can be.
Thanks also go to the following people for significant contributions to this documentation: Kevin Brannen, Vlad
Dascalu, Ben FrantzDale, Eric Hanson, Zach Lipton, Gervase Markham, Andrew Pearson, Joe Robins, Spencer Smith,
Ron Teitelbaum, Shane Travis, Martin Wulffeld.
Also, thanks are due to the members of the mozilla.support.bugzilla
(news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.support.bugzilla) newsgroup (and its predecessor,
netscape.public.mozilla.webtools). Without your discussions, insight, suggestions, and patches, this could never have
happened.

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 Chapter 1. About This Guide

1.5. Document Conventions

This document uses the following conventions:

Descriptions Appearance
Warning
Caution
Don’t run with scissors!

Hint Tip: Would you like a breath mint?

Note Note: Dear John...
Information requiring special attention
Warning
Read this or the cat gets it.

File or directory name filename

Command to be typed command
Application name application
Normal user’s prompt under bash shell bash$
Root user’s prompt under bash shell bash#
Normal user’s prompt under tcsh shell tcsh$
Environment variables VARIABLE
Term found in the glossary Bugzilla
Code example <para> Beginning and end of paragraph
</para>

This documentation is maintained in DocBook 4.1.2 XML format. Changes are best
submitted as plain text or XML diffs, attached to a bug filed in the Bugzilla Documentation
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&component=Documentation) component.

3
Chapter 2. Installing Bugzilla

2.1. Installation
Note: If you just want to use Bugzilla, you do not need to install it. None of this chapter is relevant to you. Ask your
Bugzilla administrator for the URL to access it over the web.

The Bugzilla server software is usually installed on Linux or Solaris. If you are installing on another OS, check Section
2.5 before you start your installation to see if there are any special instructions.
As an alternative to following these instructions, you may wish to try Arne Schirmacher’s unofficial and unsupported
Bugzilla Installer (http://www.softwaretesting.de/article/view/33/1/8/), which installs Bugzilla and all its prerequisites
on Linux or Solaris systems.
This guide assumes that you have administrative access to the Bugzilla machine. It not possible to install and run
Bugzilla itself without administrative access except in the very unlikely event that every single prerequisite is already
installed.

Warning
The installation process may make your machine insecure for short periods of time. Make sure there is a
firewall between you and the Internet.

You are strongly recommended to make a backup of your system before installing Bugzilla (and at regular intervals
thereafter :-).
In outline, the installation proceeds as follows:

1. Install Perl (5.6.1 or above for non-Windows platforms; 5.8.1 for Windows)
2. Install a Database Engine
3. Install a Webserver
4. Install Bugzilla
5. Install Perl modules
6. Install a Mail Transfer Agent (Sendmail 8.7 or above, or an MTA that is Sendmail-compatible with at least this
version)
7. Configure all of the above.

2.1.1. Perl
Installed Version Test: perl -v
Any machine that doesn’t have Perl on it is a sad machine indeed. If you don’t have it and your OS doesn’t provide
official packages, visit http://www.perl.com. Although Bugzilla runs with Perl 5.6.1, it’s a good idea to be using the
latest stable version.

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 Chapter 2. Installing Bugzilla

2.1.2. Database Engine

From Bugzilla 2.20, support is included for using both the MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers. You only require
one of these systems to make use of Bugzilla.

2.1.2.1. MySQL
Installed Version Test: mysql -V
If you don’t have it and your OS doesn’t provide official packages, visit http://www.mysql.com. You need MySQL
version 4.0.14 or higher.

Note: Many of the binary versions of MySQL store their data files in /var. On some Unix systems, this is part of
a smaller root partition, and may not have room for your bug database. To change the data directory, you have to
build MySQL from source yourself, and set it as an option to configure.

If you install from something other than a packaging/installation system, such as .rpm (Redhat Package), .deb (Debian
Package), .exe (Windows Executable), or .msi (Microsoft Installer), make sure the MySQL server is started when the
machine boots.

2.1.2.2. PostgreSQL
Installed Version Test: psql -V
If you don’t have it and your OS doesn’t provide official packages, visit http://www.postgresql.org/. You need Post-
greSQL version 7.3.x or higher.
If you install from something other than a packaging/installation system, such as .rpm (Redhat Package), .deb (Debian
Package), .exe (Windows Executable), or .msi (Microsoft Installer), make sure the PostgreSQL server is started when
the machine boots.

2.1.3. Web Server

Installed Version Test: view the default welcome page at http://<your-machine>/
You have freedom of choice here, pretty much any web server that is capable of running CGI scripts
will work. However, we strongly recommend using the Apache web server (either 1.3.x or 2.x), and
the installation instructions usually assume you are using it. If you have got Bugzilla working using
another webserver, please share your experiences with us by filing a bug in Bugzilla Documentation
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&component=Documentation).
If you don’t have Apache and your OS doesn’t provide official packages, visit http://httpd.apache.org/.

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 Chapter 2. Installing Bugzilla

2.1.4. Bugzilla
Download a Bugzilla tarball (or check it out from CVS) and place it in a suitable directory, accessible by the default
web server user (probably “apache” or “www”). Good locations are either directly in the main web space for your
web server or perhaps in /usr/local with a symbolic link from the web space.

Caution
The default Bugzilla distribution is NOT designed to be placed in a cgi-bin directory. This includes any
directory which is configured using the ScriptAlias directive of Apache.

Once all the files are in a web accessible directory, make that directory writable by your webserver’s user. This is a
temporary step until you run the checksetup.pl script, which locks down your installation.

2.1.5. Perl Modules

Bugzilla’s installation process is based on a script called checksetup.pl. The first thing it checks is whether you
have appropriate versions of all the required Perl modules. The aim of this section is to pass this check. When it
passes, proceed to Section 2.2.
At this point, you need to su to root. You should remain as root until the end of the install. To check you have the
required modules, run:

bash# ./checksetup.pl --check-modules

checksetup.pl will print out a list of the required and optional Perl modules, together with the versions (if any)
installed on your machine. The list of required modules is reasonably long; however, you may already have several of
them installed.
There is a meta-module called Bundle::Bugzilla, which installs all the other modules with a single command. You
should use this if you are running Perl 5.6.1 or above.
The preferred way of installing Perl modules is via CPAN on Unix, or PPM on Windows (see Section 2.5.1.2). These
instructions assume you are using CPAN; if for some reason you need to install the Perl modules manually, see
Appendix D.

bash# perl -MCPAN -e ’install "<modulename>"’

If you using Bundle::Bugzilla, invoke the magic CPAN command on it. Otherwise, you need to work down the list of
modules that checksetup.pl says are required, in the order given, invoking the command on each.

Tip: Many people complain that Perl modules will not install for them. Most times, the error messages complain
that they are missing a file in “@INC”. Virtually every time, this error is due to permissions being set too restrictively
for you to compile Perl modules or not having the necessary Perl development libraries installed on your system.
Consult your local UNIX systems administrator for help solving these permissions issues; if you are the local UNIX
sysadmin, please consult the newsgroup/mailing list for further assistance or hire someone to help you out.

Note: If you are using a package-based system, and attempting to install the Perl modules from CPAN, you
may need to install the "development" packages for MySQL and GD before attempting to install the related Perl

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modules. The names of these packages will vary depending on the specific distribution you are using, but are
often called <packagename>-devel.

Here is a complete list of modules and their minimum versions. Some modules have special installation notes, which
follow.
Required Perl modules:

1. AppConfig (1.52)
2. CGI (2.93)
3. Data::Dumper (any)
4. Date::Format (2.21)
5. DBI (1.38)
6. DBD::mysql (2.9003) if using MySQL
7. DBD::Pg (1.31) if using PostgreSQL
8. File::Spec (0.84)
9. File::Temp (any)
10. Template (2.10)
11. Text::Wrap (2001.0131)
12. Mail::Mailer (1.67)
13. MIME::Base64 (3.01)
14. MIME::Parser (5.406)
15. Storable (any)
Optional Perl modules:

1. GD (1.20) for bug charting

2. Chart::Base (1.0) for bug charting
3. GD::Graph (any) for bug charting
4. GD::Text::Align (any) for bug charting
5. XML::Twig (any) for the XML interface
6. PatchReader (0.9.4) for pretty HTML view of patches
7. Image::Magick (any) for converting BMP image attachments to PNG

2.1.5.1. DBD::mysql
The installation process will ask you a few questions about the desired compilation target and your MySQL instal-
lation. For most of the questions the provided default will be adequate, but when asked if your desired target is the

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MySQL or mSQL packages, you should select the MySQL-related ones. Later you will be asked if you wish to pro-
vide backwards compatibility with the older MySQL packages; you should answer YES to this question. The default
is NO.
A host of ’localhost’ should be fine. A testing user of ’test’, with a null password, should have sufficient access to run
tests on the ’test’ database which MySQL creates upon installation.

2.1.5.2. Template Toolkit (2.10)

When you install Template Toolkit, you’ll get asked various questions about features to enable. The defaults are fine,
except that it is recommended you use the high speed XS Stash of the Template Toolkit, in order to achieve best
performance.

2.1.5.3. GD (1.20)
The GD module is only required if you want graphical reports.

Note: The Perl GD module requires some other libraries that may or may not be installed on your system, including
libpng and libgd. The full requirements are listed in the Perl GD module README. If compiling GD fails, it’s
probably because you’re missing a required library.

Tip: The version of the GD module you need is very closely tied to the libgd version installed on your system. If
you have a version 1.x of libgd the 2.x versions of the GD module won’t work for you.

2.1.5.4. Chart::Base (1.0)

The Chart::Base module is only required if you want graphical reports. Note that earlier versions that 0.99c used GIFs,
which are no longer supported by the latest versions of GD.

2.1.5.5. GD::Graph (any)

The GD::Graph module is only required if you want graphical reports.

2.1.5.6. GD::Text::Align (any)

The GD::Text::Align module is only required if you want graphical reports.

2.1.5.7. XML::Twig (any)

The XML::Twig module is only required if you want to import XML bugs using the importxml.pl script. This is
required to use Bugzilla’s "move bugs" feature; you may also want to use it for migrating from another bug database.

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2.1.5.8. PatchReader (0.9.4)

The PatchReader module is only required if you want to use Patch Viewer, a Bugzilla feature to show code patches in
your web browser in a more readable form.

2.1.6. Mail Transfer Agent (MTA)

Bugzilla is dependent on the availability of an e-mail system for its user authentication and for other tasks.

Note: This is not entirely true. It is possible to completely disable email sending, or to have Bugzilla store email
messages in a file instead of sending them. However, this is mainly intended for testing, as disabling or diverting
email on a production machine would mean that users could miss important events (such as bug changes or the
creation of new accounts).
For more information, see the “mail_delivery_method” parameter in Section 3.1.

On Linux, any Sendmail-compatible MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) will suffice. Sendmail, Postfix, qmail and Exim are
examples of common MTAs. Sendmail is the original Unix MTA, but the others are easier to configure, and therefore
many people replace Sendmail with Postfix or Exim. They are drop-in replacements, so Bugzilla will not distinguish
between them.
If you are using Sendmail, version 8.7 or higher is required. If you are using a Sendmail-compatible MTA, it must be
congruent with at least version 8.7 of Sendmail.
Consult the manual for the specific MTA you choose for detailed installation instructions. Each of these programs will
have their own configuration files where you must configure certain parameters to ensure that the mail is delivered
properly. They are implemented as services, and you should ensure that the MTA is in the auto-start list of services
for the machine.
If a simple mail sent with the command-line ’mail’ program succeeds, then Bugzilla should also be fine.

2.2. Configuration

Warning
Poorly-configured MySQL and Bugzilla installations have given attackers full access to systems in the past.
Please take the security parts of these guidelines seriously, even for Bugzilla machines hidden away behind
your firewall. Be certain to read Chapter 4 for some important security tips.

2.2.1. localconfig
You should now run checksetup.pl again, this time without the --check-modules switch.

bash# ./checksetup.pl

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This time, checksetup.pl should tell you that all the correct modules are installed and will display a message about,
and write out a file called, localconfig. This file contains the default settings for a number of Bugzilla parameters.
Load this file in your editor. The only value you need to change is $db_pass, the password for the user you will create
for your database. Pick a strong password (for simplicity, it should not contain single quote characters) and put it here.
You may need to change the value of webservergroup if your web server does not run in the "apache" group. On
Debian, for example, Apache runs in the "www-data" group. If you are going to run Bugzilla on a machine where
you do not have root access (such as on a shared web hosting account), you will need to leave webservergroup empty,
ignoring the warnings that checksetup.pl will subsequently display every time it in run.
The other options in the localconfig file are documented by their accompanying comments. If you have a slightly
non-standard MySQL setup, you may wish to change one or more of the other "$db_*" parameters.
You may also wish to change the names of the priorities, severities, operating systems and platforms for your instal-
lation. However, you can always change these after installation has finished; if you then re-run checksetup.pl, the
changes will get picked up.

2.2.2. Database Server

This section deals with configuring your database server for use with Bugzilla. Currently, MySQL (Section 2.2.2.2)
and PostgreSQL (Section 2.2.2.3) are available.

2.2.2.1. Bugzilla Database Schema

The Bugzilla database schema is available at Ravenbrook (http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti/tool/cgi/bugzilla-
schema/). This very valuable tool can generate a written description of the Bugzilla database schema for any version
of Bugzilla. It can also generate a diff between two versions to help someone see what has changed.

2.2.2.2. MySQL

Caution
MySQL’s default configuration is very insecure. Section 4.2 has some good information for improving your
installation’s security.

2.2.2.2.1. Allow large attachments

By default, MySQL will only accept packets up to 64Kb in size. If you want to have attachments larger than this, you
will need to modify your /etc/my.cnf as below.

[mysqld]
# Allow packets up to 1M
max_allowed_packet=1M

There is also a parameter in Bugzilla called ’maxattachmentsize’ (default = 1000 Kb) that controls the maximum
allowable attachment size. Attachments larger than either the ’max_allowed_packet’ or ’maxattachmentsize’ value
will not be accepted by Bugzilla.

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Note: This does not affect Big Files, attachments that are stored directly on disk instead of in the database. Their
maximum size is controlled using the ’maxlocalattachment’ parameter.

2.2.2.2.2. Allow small words in full-text indexes

By default, words must be at least four characters in length in order to be indexed by MySQL’s full-text indexes. This
causes a lot of Bugzilla specific words to be missed, including "cc", "ftp" and "uri".
MySQL can be configured to index those words by setting the ft_min_word_len param to the minimum size of the
words to index. This can be done by modifying the /etc/my.cnf according to the example below:

[mysqld]
# Allow small words in full-text indexes
ft_min_word_len=2

Rebuilding the indexes can be done based on documentation found at http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Fulltext_Fine-

tuning.html.

2.2.2.2.3. Add a user to MySQL

You need to add a new MySQL user for Bugzilla to use. (It’s not safe to have Bugzilla use the MySQL root account.)
The following instructions assume the defaults in localconfig; if you changed those, you need to modify the SQL
command appropriately. You will need the $db_pass password you set in localconfig in Section 2.2.1.
We use an SQL GRANT command to create a “bugs” user. This also restricts the “bugs”user to operations within a
database called “bugs”, and only allows the account to connect from “localhost”. Modify it to reflect your setup if you
will be connecting from another machine or as a different user.
Run the mysql command-line client and enter:

mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT,

UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE, LOCK TABLES,
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.*
TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ’$db_pass’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

2.2.2.2.4. Permit attachments table to grow beyond 4GB

By default, MySQL will limit the size of a table to 4GB. This limit is present even if the underlying filesystem has no
such limit. To set a higher limit, follow these instructions.
After you have completed the rest of the installation (or at least the database setup parts), you should run the MySQL
command-line client and enter the following, replacing $bugs_db with your Bugzilla database name (bugs by de-
fault):

mysql> use $bugs_db

mysql> ALTER TABLE attachments
AVG_ROW_LENGTH=1000000, MAX_ROWS=20000;

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The above command will change the limit to 20GB. Mysql will have to make a temporary copy of your entire table to
do this. Ideally, you should do this when your attachments table is still small.

Note: This does not affect Big Files, attachments that are stored directly on disk instead of in the database.

2.2.2.3. PostgreSQL

Note: If you are using PostgreSQL 8.0.1 or higher, then you will require to use a version of DBD::Pg which is equal
to or greater than version 1.41

2.2.2.3.1. Add a User to PostgreSQL

You need to add a new user to PostgreSQL for the Bugzilla application to use when accessing the database. The
following instructions assume the defaults in localconfig; if you changed those, you need to modify the commands
appropriately. You will need the $db_pass password you set in localconfig in Section 2.2.1.
On most systems, to create the user in PostgreSQL, you will need to login as the root user, and then

bash# su - postgres

As the postgres user, you then need to create a new user:

bash$ createuser -U postgres -dAP bugs

When asked for a password, provide the password which will be set as $db_pass in localconfig. The created
user will have the ability to create databases and will not be able to create new users.

2.2.2.3.2. Configure PostgreSQL

Now, you will need to edit pg_hba.conf which is usually located in /var/lib/pgsql/data/. In this file, you will
need to add a new line to it as follows:
host all bugs 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 md5

This means that for TCP/IP (host) connections, allow connections from ’127.0.0.1’ to ’all’ databases on this server
from the ’bugs’ user, and use password authentication (md5) for that user.
If you are using versions of PostgreSQL before version 8, you may also need to edit postgresql.conf , also
usually found in the /var/lib/pgsql/data/ folder. You will need to make a single line change, changing
# tcpip_socket = false

to
tcpip_socket = true
Now, you will need to restart PostgreSQL, but you will need to fully stop and start the server rather than just restart-
ing due to the possibility of a change to postgresql.conf. After the server has restarted, you will need to edit

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localconfig, finding the $db_driver variable and setting it to Pg and changing the password in $db_pass to the
one you picked previously, while setting up the account.

2.2.3. checksetup.pl
Next, rerun checksetup.pl. It reconfirms that all the modules are present, and notices the altered localconfig file,
which it assumes you have edited to your satisfaction. It compiles the UI templates, connects to the database using the
’bugs’ user you created and the password you defined, and creates the ’bugs’ database and the tables therein.
After that, it asks for details of an administrator account. Bugzilla can have multiple administrators - you can create
more later - but it needs one to start off with. Enter the email address of an administrator, his or her full name, and a
suitable Bugzilla password.
checksetup.pl will then finish. You may rerun checksetup.pl at any time if you wish.

2.2.4. Web server

Configure your web server according to the instructions in the appropriate section. (If it makes a difference in your
choice, the Bugzilla Team recommends Apache.) To check whether your web server is correctly configured, try to
access testagent.cgi from your web server. If "OK" is displayed, then your configuration is successful. Regardless
of which web server you are using, however, ensure that sensitive information is not remotely available by properly
applying the access controls in Section 4.3.1. You can run testserver.pl to check if your web server serves
Bugzilla files as expected.

2.2.4.1. Apache httpd

To configure your Apache web server to work with Bugzilla, do the following:

1. Load httpd.conf in your editor. In Fedora and Red Hat Linux, this file is found in /etc/httpd/conf.
2. Apache uses <Directory> directives to permit fine-grained permission setting. Add the following lines to a
directive that applies to the location of your Bugzilla installation. (If such a section does not exist, you’ll want to
add one.) In this example, Bugzilla has been installed at /var/www/html/bugzilla.
<Directory /var/www/html/bugzilla>
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +Indexes +ExecCGI
DirectoryIndex index.cgi
AllowOverride Limit
</Directory>

These instructions: allow apache to run .cgi files found within the bugzilla directory; instructs the server to look
for a file called index.cgi if someone only types the directory name into the browser; and allows Bugzilla’s
.htaccess files to override global permissions.

Note: It is possible to make these changes globally, or to the directive controlling Bugzilla’s parent directory
(e.g. <Directory /var/www/html/>). Such changes would also apply to the Bugzilla directory... but they

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would also apply to many other places where they may or may not be appropriate. In most cases, including
this one, it is better to be as restrictive as possible when granting extra access.

3. checksetup.pl can set tighter permissions on Bugzilla’s files and directories if it knows what group the web-
server runs as. Find the Group line in httpd.conf, place the value found there in the $webservergroup
variable in localconfig, then rerun checksetup.pl.
4. Optional: If Bugzilla does not actually reside in the webspace directory, but instead has been symbolically linked
there, you will need to add the following to the Options line of the Bugzilla <Directory> directive (the same
one as in the step above):
+FollowSymLinks

Without this directive, Apache will not follow symbolic links to places outside its own directory structure, and
you will be unable to run Bugzilla.

2.2.4.2. Microsoft Internet Information Services

If you are running Bugzilla on Windows and choose to use Microsoft’s Internet Information Services or Personal Web
Server you will need to perform a number of other configuration steps as explained below. You may also want to refer
to the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles: 245225 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;245225) “HOW TO: Configure and Test a PERL Script with IIS 4.0, 5.0, and 5.1” (for Internet Information Ser-
vices) and 231998 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;231998) “HOW TO: FP2000: How to
Use Perl with Microsoft Personal Web Server on Windows 95/98” (for Personal Web Server).
You will need to create a virtual directory for the Bugzilla install. Put the Bugzilla files in a directory that is named
something other than what you want your end-users accessing. That is, if you want your users to access your Bugzilla
installation through “http://<yourdomainname>/Bugzilla”, then do not put your Bugzilla files in a directory named
“Bugzilla”. Instead, place them in a different location, and then use the IIS Administration tool to create a Virtual
Directory named "Bugzilla" that acts as an alias for the actual location of the files. When creating that virtual directory,
make sure you add the “Execute (such as ISAPI applications or CGI)” access permission.
You will also need to tell IIS how to handle Bugzilla’s .cgi files. Using the IIS Administration tool again, open up the
properties for the new virtual directory and select the Configuration option to access the Script Mappings. Create an
entry mapping .cgi to:

<full path to perl.exe >\perl.exe -x<full path to Bugzilla> -wT "%s" %s

For example:

c:\perl\bin\perl.exe -xc:\bugzilla -wT "%s" %s

Note: The ActiveState install may have already created an entry for .pl files that is limited to “GET,HEAD,POST”.
If so, this mapping should be removed as Bugzilla’s .pl files are not designed to be run via a webserver.

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IIS will also need to know that the index.cgi should be treated as a default document. On the Documents tab page of
the virtual directory properties, you need to add index.cgi as a default document type. If you wish, you may remove
the other default document types for this particular virtual directory, since Bugzilla doesn’t use any of them.
Also, and this can’t be stressed enough, make sure that files such as localconfig and your data directory are
secured as described in Section 4.3.1.

2.2.5. Bugzilla
Your Bugzilla should now be working. Access http://<your-bugzilla-server>/ - you should see the Bugzilla
front page. If not, consult the Troubleshooting section, Appendix B.

Note: The URL above may be incorrect if you installed Bugzilla into a subdirectory or used a symbolic link from
your web site root to the Bugzilla directory.

Log in with the administrator account you defined in the last checksetup.pl run. You should go through the pa-
rameters on the Edit Parameters page (see link in the footer) and see if there are any you wish to change. They key
parameters are documented in Section 3.1; you should certainly alter maintainer and urlbase; you may also want to
alter cookiepath or requirelogin.
This would also be a good time to revisit the localconfig file and make sure that the names of the priorities,
severities, platforms and operating systems are those you wish to use when you start creating bugs. Remember to
rerun checksetup.pl if you change it.
Bugzilla has several optional features which require extra configuration. You can read about those in Section 2.3.

2.3. Optional Additional Configuration

Bugzilla has a number of optional features. This section describes how to configure or enable them.

2.3.1. Bug Graphs

If you have installed the necessary Perl modules you can start collecting statistics for the nifty Bugzilla graphs.

bash# crontab -e

This should bring up the crontab file in your editor. Add a cron entry like this to run collectstats.pl daily at 5
after midnight:

5 0 * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./collectstats.pl

After two days have passed you’ll be able to view bug graphs from the Reports page.
When upgrading Bugzilla, this format may change. To create new status data, (re)move old data and run the following
commands:

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bash$
cd <your-bugzilla-directory>
bash$
./collectstats.pl --regenerate

Note: Windows does not have ’cron’, but it does have the Task Scheduler, which performs the same duties. There
are also third-party tools that can be used to implement cron, such as nncron (http://www.nncron.ru/).

2.3.2. Dependency Charts

As well as the text-based dependency trees, Bugzilla also supports a graphical view of dependency relationships, using
a package called ’dot’. Exactly how this works is controlled by the ’webdotbase’ parameter, which can have one of
three values:

1. A complete file path to the command ’dot’ (part of GraphViz (http://www.graphviz.org/)) will generate the graphs
locally
2. A URL prefix pointing to an installation of the webdot package will generate the graphs remotely
3. A blank value will disable dependency graphing.

The easiest way to get this working is to install GraphViz (http://www.graphviz.org/). If you do that, you need to enable
server-side image maps (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_imap.html) in Apache. Alternatively, you could set up
a webdot server, or use the AT&T public webdot server. This is the default for the webdotbase param, but it’s often
overloaded and slow. Note that AT&T’s server won’t work if Bugzilla is only accessible using HARTS. Editor’s note:
What the heck is HARTS? Google doesn’t know...

2.3.3. The Whining Cron

What good are bugs if they’re not annoying? To help make them more so you can set up Bugzilla’s automatic whining
system to complain at engineers which leave their bugs in the NEW or REOPENED state without triaging them.
This can be done by adding the following command as a daily crontab entry, in the same manner as explained above
for bug graphs. This example runs it at 12.55am.

55 0 * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./whineatnews.pl

Note: Windows does not have ’cron’, but it does have the Task Scheduler, which performs the same duties. There
are also third-party tools that can be used to implement cron, such as nncron (http://www.nncron.ru/).

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2.3.4. Whining
As of Bugzilla 2.20, users can configure Bugzilla to regularly annoy them at regular intervals, by having Bugzilla
execute saved searches at certain times and emailing the results to the user. This is known as "Whining". The process
of configuring Whining is described in Section 5.13, but for it to work a Perl script must be executed at regular
intervals.
This can be done by adding the following command as a daily crontab entry, in the same manner as explained above
for bug graphs. This example runs it every 15 minutes.

*/15 * * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./whine.pl

Note: Whines can be executed as often as every 15 minutes, so if you specify longer intervals between executions
of whine.pl, some users may not be whined at as often as they would expect. Depending on the person, this can
either be a very Good Thing or a very Bad Thing.

Note: Windows does not have ’cron’, but it does have the Task Scheduler, which performs the same duties. There
are also third-party tools that can be used to implement cron, such as nncron (http://www.nncron.ru/).

2.3.5. Patch Viewer

Patch Viewer is the engine behind Bugzilla’s graphical display of code patches. You can integrate this with copies
of the cvs, lxr and bonsai tools if you have them, by giving the locations of your installation of these tools in
editparams.cgi.

Patch Viewer also optionally will use the cvs, diff and interdiff command-line utilities if they exist on the
system. Interdiff can be obtained from http://cyberelk.net/tim/patchutils/. If these programs are not in the system path,
you can configure their locations in localconfig.

2.3.6. LDAP Authentication

LDAP authentication is a module for Bugzilla’s plugin authentication architecture.
The existing authentication scheme for Bugzilla uses email addresses as the primary user ID, and a password to
authenticate that user. All places within Bugzilla where you need to deal with user ID (e.g assigning a bug) use the
email address. The LDAP authentication builds on top of this scheme, rather than replacing it. The initial log in is
done with a username and password for the LDAP directory. This then fetches the email address from LDAP and
authenticates seamlessly in the standard Bugzilla authentication scheme using this email address. If an account for
this address already exists in your Bugzilla system, it will log in to that account. If no account for that email address
exists, one is created at the time of login. (In this case, Bugzilla will attempt to use the "displayName" or "cn" attribute
to determine the user’s full name.) After authentication, all other user-related tasks are still handled by email address,
not LDAP username. You still assign bugs by email address, query on users by email address, etc.

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Caution
Because the Bugzilla account is not created until the first time a user logs in, a user who has not yet
logged is unknown to Bugzilla. This means they cannot be used as an assignee or QA contact (de-
fault or otherwise), added to any cc list, or any other such operation. One possible workaround is the
bugzilla_ldapsync.rb script in the contrib directory. Another possible solution is fixing bug 201069
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201069).

Parameters required to use LDAP Authentication:

user_verify_class
This parameter should be set to “LDAP” only if you will be using an LDAP directory for authentication. If you
set this param to “LDAP” but fail to set up the other parameters listed below you will not be able to log back
in to Bugzilla one you log out. If this happens to you, you will need to manually edit data/params and set
user_verify_class to “DB”.

LDAPserver
This parameter should be set to the name (and optionally the port) of your LDAP server. If no port is specified, it
assumes the default LDAP port of 389.
Ex. “ldap.company.com” or “ldap.company.com:3268”

LDAPbinddn [Optional]
Some LDAP servers will not allow an anonymous bind to search the directory. If this is the case with your
configuration you should set the LDAPbinddn parameter to the user account Bugzilla should use instead of the
anonymous bind.
Ex. “cn=default,cn=user:password”

LDAPBaseDN
The LDAPBaseDN parameter should be set to the location in your LDAP tree that you would like to search for
email addresses. Your uids should be unique under the DN specified here.
Ex. “ou=People,o=Company”

LDAPuidattribute
The LDAPuidattribute parameter should be set to the attribute which contains the unique UID of your users. The
value retrieved from this attribute will be used when attempting to bind as the user to confirm their password.
Ex. “uid”

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LDAPmailattribute
The LDAPmailattribute parameter should be the name of the attribute which contains the email address your
users will enter into the Bugzilla login boxes.
Ex. “mail”

2.3.7. Serving Alternate Formats with the right MIME type

Some Bugzilla pages have alternate formats, other than just plain HTML. In particular, a few Bugzilla pages can
output their contents as either XUL (a special Mozilla format, that looks like a program GUI) or RDF (a type of
structured XML that can be read by various programs).
In order for your users to see these pages correctly, Apache must send them with the right MIME type. To do this, add
the following lines to your Apache configuration, either in the <VirtualHost> section for your Bugzilla, or in the
<Directory> section for your Bugzilla:

AddType application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml .xul

AddType application/rdf+xml .rdf

2.4. Multiple Bugzilla databases with a single installation

The previous instructions refered to a standard installation, with one unique Bugzilla database. However, you may
want to host several distinct installations, without having several copies of the code. This is possible by using the
PROJECT environment variable. When accessed, Bugzilla checks for the existence of this variable, and if present,
uses its value to check for an alternative configuration file named localconfig.<PROJECT> in the same location as
the default one (localconfig). It also checks for customized templates in a directory named <PROJECT> in the same
location as the default one (template/<langcode>). By default this is template/en/default so PROJECT’s
templates would be located at template/en/PROJECT.
To set up an alternate installation, just export PROJECT=foo before running checksetup.pl for the first time. It will
result in a file called localconfig.foo instead of localconfig. Edit this file as described above, with reference
to a new database, and re-run checksetup.pl to populate it. That’s all.
Now you have to configure the web server to pass this environment variable when accessed via an alternate URL,
such as virtual host for instance. The following is an example of how you could do it in Apache, other Webservers
may differ.

<VirtualHost 212.85.153.228:80>
ServerName foo.bar.baz
SetEnv PROJECT foo
Alias /bugzilla /var/www/bugzilla
</VirtualHost>

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Don’t forget to also export this variable before accessing Bugzilla by other means, such as cron tasks for instance.

2.5. OS-Specific Installation Notes

Many aspects of the Bugzilla installation can be affected by the operating system you choose to install it on. Sometimes
it can be made easier and others more difficult. This section will attempt to help you understand both the difficulties
of running on specific operating systems and the utilities available to make it easier.
If you have anything to add or notes for an operating system not covered, please file a bug in Bugzilla Documentation
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&component=Documentation).

2.5.1. Microsoft Windows

Making Bugzilla work on Windows is more difficult than making it work on Unix. For that reason, we still recommend
doing so on a Unix based system such as GNU/Linux. That said, if you do want to get Bugzilla running on Windows,
you will need to make the following adjustments.

2.5.1.1. Win32 Perl

Perl for Windows can be obtained from ActiveState (http://www.activestate.com/). You should be able to find a com-
piled binary at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/. The following instructions assume that you
are using version 5.8.1 of ActiveState.

2.5.1.2. Perl Modules on Win32

Bugzilla on Windows requires the same perl modules found in Section 2.1.5. The main difference is that windows
uses PPM instead of CPAN.

C:\perl> ppm install <module name>

The best source for the Windows PPM modules needed for Bugzilla is probably the Bugzilla Test Server (aka ’Land-
fill’), so you should add the Landfill package repository as follows:

ppm repository add landfill http://www.landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/

Note: The PPM repository stores modules in ’packages’ that may have a slightly different name than the module.
If retrieving these modules from there, you will need to pay attention to the information provided when you run
checksetup.pl as it will tell you what package you’ll need to install.

Tip: If you are behind a corporate firewall, you will need to let the ActiveState PPM utility know how to get through
it to access the repositories by setting the HTTP_proxy system environmental variable. For more information on
setting that variable, see the ActiveState documentation.

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2.5.1.3. Code changes required to run on Win32

Bugzilla on Win32 is supported out of the box from version 2.20; this means that no code changes are required to get
Bugzilla running.

2.5.1.4. Serving the web pages

As is the case on Unix based systems, any web server should be able to handle Bugzilla; however, the Bugzilla Team
still recommends Apache whenever asked. No matter what web server you choose, be sure to pay attention to the
security notes in Section 4.3.1. More information on configuring specific web servers can be found in Section 2.2.4.

Note: If using Apache on windows, you can set the ScriptInterpreterSource (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-
2.0/mod/core.html#scriptinterpretersource) directive in your Apache config to avoid having to modify the first line
of every script to contain your path to perl perl instead of /usr/bin/perl.

2.5.1.5. Sending Email

To enable Bugzilla to send email on Windows, the server running the Bugzilla code must be able to connect to, or act
as, an SMTP server.

2.5.2. Mac OS X
Making Bugzilla work on Mac OS X requires the following adjustments.

2.5.2.1. Sendmail
In Mac OS X 10.3 and later, Postfix (http://www.postfix.org/) is used as the built-in email server. Postfix provides an
executable that mimics sendmail enough to fool Bugzilla, as long as Bugzilla can find it.
As of version 2.20, Bugzilla will be able to find the fake sendmail executable without any assistance. However, you
will have to turn on the sendmailnow parameter before you do anything that would result in email being sent. For
more information, see the description of the sendmailnow parameter in Section 3.1.

2.5.2.2. Libraries & Perl Modules on Mac OS X

Apple did not include the GD library with Mac OS X. Bugzilla needs this for bug graphs.
You can install it using a program called Fink, which is similar in nature to the CPAN installer, but installs common
GNU utilities. Fink is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fink/.
Follow the instructions for setting up Fink. Once it’s installed, you’ll want to use it to install the gd2 package.

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It will prompt you for a number of dependencies, type ’y’ and hit enter to install all of the dependencies and then
watch it work. You will then be able to use CPAN to install the GD Perl module.

Note: To prevent creating conflicts with the software that Apple installs by default, Fink creates its own directory
tree at /sw where it installs most of the software that it installs. This means your libraries and headers will be
at /sw/lib and /sw/include instead of /usr/lib and /usr/include. When the Perl module config script asks
where your libgd is, be sure to tell it /sw/lib.

Also available via Fink is expat. After using fink to install the expat package you will be able to install XML::Parser
using CPAN. There is one caveat. Unlike recent versions of the GD module, XML::Parser doesn’t prompt for the
location of the required libraries. When using CPAN, you will need to use the following command sequence:

# perl -MCPAN -e’look XML::Parser’ ➊

# perl Makefile.PL EXPATLIBPATH=/sw/lib EXPATINCPATH=/sw/include
# make; make test; make install ➋
# exit ➌

➊➌ The look command will download the module and spawn a new shell with the extracted files as the current
working directory. The exit command will return you to your original shell.
➋ You should watch the output from these make commands, especially “make test” as errors may prevent
XML::Parser from functioning correctly with Bugzilla.

2.5.3. Linux-Mandrake 8.0

Linux-Mandrake 8.0 includes every required and optional library for Bugzilla. The easiest way to install them is
by using the urpmi utility. If you follow these commands, you should have everything you need for Bugzilla, and
./checksetup.pl should not complain about any missing libraries. You may already have some of these installed.

bash# urpmi perl-mysql

bash# urpmi perl-chart
bash# urpmi perl-gd
bash# urpmi perl-MailTools ➊
bash# urpmi apache-modules

➊ for Bugzilla email integration

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2.6. UNIX (non-root) Installation Notes

2.6.1. Introduction
If you are running a *NIX OS as non-root, either due to lack of access (web hosts, for example) or for security reasons,
this will detail how to install Bugzilla on such a setup. It is recommended that you read through the Section 2.1 first
to get an idea on the installation steps required. (These notes will reference to steps in that guide.)

2.6.2. MySQL
You may have MySQL installed as root. If you’re setting up an account with a web host, a MySQL account needs to
be set up for you. From there, you can create the bugs account, or use the account given to you.

Warning
You may have problems trying to set up GRANT permissions to the database. If you’re using a web host,
chances are that you have a separate database which is already locked down (or one big database with
limited/no access to the other areas), but you may want to ask your system administrator what the security
settings are set to, and/or run the GRANT command for you.
Also, you will probably not be able to change the MySQL root user password (for obvious reasons), so skip
that step.

2.6.2.1. Running MySQL as Non-Root

2.6.2.1.1. The Custom Configuration Method

Create a file .my.cnf in your home directory (using /home/foo in this example) as follows....

[mysqld]
datadir=/home/foo/mymysql
socket=/home/foo/mymysql/thesock
port=8081

[mysql]
socket=/home/foo/mymysql/thesock
port=8081

[mysql.server]
user=mysql
basedir=/var/lib

[safe_mysqld]
err-log=/home/foo/mymysql/the.log
pid-file=/home/foo/mymysql/the.pid

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2.6.2.1.2. The Custom Built Method

You can install MySQL as a not-root, if you really need to. Build it with PREFIX set to /home/foo/mysql, or use
pre-installed executables, specifying that you want to put all of the data files in /home/foo/mysql/data. If there is
another MySQL server running on the system that you do not own, use the -P option to specify a TCP port that is not
in use.

2.6.2.1.3. Starting the Server

After your mysqld program is built and any .my.cnf file is in place, you must initialize the databases (ONCE).

bash$
mysql_install_db

Then start the daemon with

bash$
safe_mysql &

After you start mysqld the first time, you then connect to it as "root" and GRANT permissions to other users. (Again,
the MySQL root account has nothing to do with the *NIX root account.)

Note: You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either ask your system administrator to add them to
system startup files, or add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons and restart them if
needed.

Warning
Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first consulting your system administrator!
Daemons use up system resources and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any
machine on which you are a user!

2.6.3. Perl
On the extremely rare chance that you don’t have Perl on the machine, you will have to build the sources yourself.
The following commands should get your system installed with your own personal version of Perl:

bash$
wget http://perl.com/CPAN/src/stable.tar.gz
bash$
tar zvxf stable.tar.gz
bash$
cd perl-5.8.1 (or whatever the version of Perl is called)
bash$

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sh Configure -de -Dprefix=/home/foo/perl

bash$
make && make test && make install

Once you have Perl installed into a directory (probably in ~/perl/bin), you’ll have to change the locations on the
scripts, which is detailed later on this page.

2.6.4. Perl Modules

Installing the Perl modules as a non-root user is probably the hardest part of the process. There are two different
methods: a completely independant Perl with its own modules, or personal modules using the current (root installed)
version of Perl. The independant method takes up quite a bit of disk space, but is less complex, while the mixed
method only uses as much space as the modules themselves, but takes more work to setup.

2.6.4.1. The Independant Method

The independant method requires that you install your own personal version of Perl, as detailed in the previous section.
Once installed, you can start the CPAN shell with the following command:

bash$
/home/foo/perl/bin/perl -MCPAN -e ’shell’

And then:

cpan>
install Bundle::Bugzilla

With this method, module installation will usually go a lot smoother, but if you have any hang-ups, you can consult
the next section.

2.6.4.2. The Mixed Method

First, you’ll need to configure CPAN to install modules in your home directory. The CPAN FAQ says the following
on this issue:

5) I am not root, how can I install a module in a personal directory?

You will most probably like something like this:

o conf makepl_arg "LIB=~/myperl/lib \

INSTALLMAN1DIR=~/myperl/man/man1 \
INSTALLMAN3DIR=~/myperl/man/man3"

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install Sybase::Sybperl

You can make this setting permanent like all "o conf" settings with "o conf commit".

You will have to add ~/myperl/man to the MANPATH environment variable and also tell your Perl pro
look into ~/myperl/lib, e.g. by including

use lib "$ENV{HOME}/myperl/lib";

or setting the PERL5LIB environment variable.

Another thing you should bear in mind is that the UNINST parameter should never be set if you are

So, you will need to create a Perl directory in your home directory, as well as the lib, man, man/man1, and man/man3
directories in that Perl directory. Set the MANPATH variable and PERL5LIB variable, so that the installation of the
modules goes smoother. (Setting UNINST=0 in your "make install" options, on the CPAN first-time configuration, is
also a good idea.)
After that, go into the CPAN shell:

bash$
perl -MCPAN -e ’shell’

From there, you will need to type in the above "o conf" command and commit the changes. Then you can run through
the installation:

cpan>
install Bundle::Bugzilla

Most of the module installation process should go smoothly. However, you may have some problems with Template.
When you first start, you will want to try to install Template with the XS Stash options on. If this doesn’t work, it may
spit out C compiler error messages and croak back to the CPAN shell prompt. So, redo the install, and turn it off. (In
fact, say no to all of the Template questions.) It may also start failing on a few of the tests. If the total tests passed is a
reasonable figure (90+%), force the install with the following command:

cpan>
force install Template

You may also want to install the other optional modules:

cpan>
install GD
cpan>

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install Chart::Base
cpan>
install MIME::Parser

2.6.5. HTTP Server

Ideally, this also needs to be installed as root and run under a special webserver account. As long as the web server
will allow the running of *.cgi files outside of a cgi-bin, and a way of denying web access to certain files (such as a
.htaccess file), you should be good in this department.

2.6.5.1. Running Apache as Non-Root

You can run Apache as a non-root user, but the port will need to be set to one above 1024. If you type httpd -V, you
will get a list of the variables that your system copy of httpd uses. One of those, namely HTTPD_ROOT, tells you
where that installation looks for its config information.
From there, you can copy the config files to your own home directory to start editing. When you edit those and then
use the -d option to override the HTTPD_ROOT compiled into the web server, you get control of your own customized
web server.

Note: You will need to start the daemons yourself. You can either ask your system administrator to add them to
system startup files, or add a crontab entry that runs a script to check on these daemons and restart them if
needed.

Warning
Do NOT run daemons or other services on a server without first consulting your system administrator!
Daemons use up system resources and running one may be in violation of your terms of service for any
machine on which you are a user!

2.6.6. Bugzilla
If you had to install Perl modules as a non-root user (Section 2.6.4) or to non-standard directories, you will need to
change the scripts, setting the correct location of the Perl modules:

perl -pi -e
’s@use strict\;@use strict\; use lib \"/home/foo/perl/lib\"\;@’
*cgi *pl Bug.pm processmail syncshadowdb

Change /home/foo/perl/lib to your personal Perl library directory. You can probably skip this step if you are
using the independant method of Perl module installation.

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When you run ./checksetup.pl to create the localconfig file, it will list the Perl modules it finds. If one is missing,
go back and double-check the module installation from the CPAN shell, then delete the localconfig file and try
again.

Warning
The one option in localconfig you might have problems with is the web server group. If you can’t success-
fully browse to the index.cgi (like a Forbidden error), you may have to relax your permissions, and blank
out the web server group. Of course, this may pose as a security risk. Having a properly jailed shell and/or
limited access to shell accounts may lessen the security risk, but use at your own risk.

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3.1. Bugzilla Configuration

Bugzilla is configured by changing various parameters, accessed from the "Edit parameters" link in the page footer.
Here are some of the key parameters on that page. You should run down this list and set them appropriately after
installing Bugzilla.

maintainer
The maintainer parameter is the email address of the person responsible for maintaining this Bugzilla installation.
The address need not be that of a valid Bugzilla account.

urlbase
This parameter defines the fully qualified domain name and web server path to your Bugzilla installation.
For example, if your Bugzilla query page is http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/query.cgi, set your “urlbase”
to http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/.

makeproductgroups
This dictates whether or not to automatically create groups when new products are created.

useentrygroupdefault
Bugzilla products can have a group associated with them, so that certain users can only see bugs in certain
products. When this parameter is set to “on”, this causes the initial group controls on newly created products to
place all newly-created bugs in the group having the same name as the product immediately. After a product is
initially created, the group controls can be further adjusted without interference by this mechanism.

mail_delivery_method
This is used to specify how email is sent, or if it is sent at all. There are several options included for different
MTAs, along with two additional options that disable email sending. "testfile" does not send mail, but instead
saves it in data/mailer.testfile for later review. "none" disables email sending entirely.

shadowdb
You run into an interesting problem when Bugzilla reaches a high level of continuous activity. MySQL supports
only table-level write locking. What this means is that if someone needs to make a change to a bug, they will lock
the entire table until the operation is complete. Locking for write also blocks reads until the write is complete.
Note that more recent versions of mysql support row level locking using different table types. These types are
slower than the standard type, and Bugzilla does not yet take advantage of features such as transactions which
would justify this speed decrease. The Bugzilla team are, however, happy to hear about any experiences with row
level locking and Bugzilla.
The “shadowdb” parameter was designed to get around this limitation. While only a single user is allowed to
write to a table at a time, reads can continue unimpeded on a read-only shadow copy of the database. Although

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your database size will double, a shadow database can cause an enormous performance improvement when
implemented on extremely high-traffic Bugzilla databases.
As a guide, on reasonably old hardware, mozilla.org began needing “shadowdb” when they reached around
40,000 Bugzilla users with several hundred Bugzilla bug changes and comments per day.
The value of the parameter defines the name of the shadow bug database. You will need to set the host and port
settings from the params page, and set up replication in your database server so that updates reach this readonly
mirror. Consult your database documentation for more detail.

shutdownhtml
If you need to shut down Bugzilla to perform administration, enter some descriptive text (with embedded HTML
codes, if you’d like) into this box. Anyone who tries to use Bugzilla (including admins) will receive a page
displaying this text. Users can neither log in nor log out while shutdownhtml is enabled.

Note: Although regular log-in capability is disabled while ’shutdownhtml’ is enabled, safeguards are in place
to protect the unfortunate admin who loses connection to Bugzilla. Should this happen to you, go directly to
the editparams.cgi (by typing the URL in manually, if necessary). Doing this will prompt you to log in, and
your name/password will be accepted here (but nowhere else).

passwordmail
Every time a user creates an account, the text of this parameter (with substitutions) is sent to the new user along
with their password message.
Add any text you wish to the "passwordmail" parameter box. For instance, many people choose to use this box
to give a quick training blurb about how to use Bugzilla at your site.

movebugs
This option is an undocumented feature to allow moving bugs between separate Bugzilla installations. You will
need to understand the source code in order to use this feature. Please consult movebugs.pl in your Bugzilla
source tree for further documentation, such as it is.

useqacontact
This allows you to define an email address for each component, in addition to that of the default assignee, who
will be sent carbon copies of incoming bugs.

usestatuswhiteboard
This defines whether you wish to have a free-form, overwritable field associated with each bug. The advantage
of the Status Whiteboard is that it can be deleted or modified with ease, and provides an easily-searchable field
for indexing some bugs that have some trait in common.

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whinedays
Set this to the number of days you want to let bugs go in the NEW or REOPENED state before notifying people
they have untouched new bugs. If you do not plan to use this feature, simply do not set up the whining cron job
described in the installation instructions, or set this value to "0" (never whine).

commenton*
All these fields allow you to dictate what changes can pass without comment, and which must have a comment
from the person who changed them. Often, administrators will allow users to add themselves to the CC list,
accept bugs, or change the Status Whiteboard without adding a comment as to their reasons for the change, yet
require that most other changes come with an explanation.
Set the "commenton" options according to your site policy. It is a wise idea to require comments when users
resolve, reassign, or reopen bugs at the very least.

Note: It is generally far better to require a developer comment when resolving bugs than not. Few things are
more annoying to bug database users than having a developer mark a bug "fixed" without any comment as
to what the fix was (or even that it was truly fixed!)

supportwatchers
Turning on this option allows users to ask to receive copies of bug mail sent to another user. Watching a user with
different group permissions is not a way to ’get around’ the system; copied emails are still subject to the normal
groupset permissions of a bug, and “watchers” will only be copied on emails from bugs they would normally be
allowed to view.

noresolveonopenblockers
This option will prevent users from resolving bugs as FIXED if they have unresolved dependencies. Only the
FIXED resolution is affected. Users will be still able to resolve bugs to resolutions other than FIXED if they have
unresolved dependent bugs.

sendmailnow
When Bugzilla is using Sendmail older than 8.12, turning this option off will improve performance by not waiting
for Sendmail to actually send mail. If Sendmail 8.12 or later is being used, there is nothing to gain by turning this
off. If another MTA is being used, such as Postfix, then this option *must* be turned on (even if you are using
the fake sendmail executable that Postfix provides).

3.2. User Administration

3.2.1. Creating the Default User

When you first run checksetup.pl after installing Bugzilla, it will prompt you for the administrative username (email
address) and password for this "super user". If for some reason you delete the "super user" account, re-running check-
setup.pl will again prompt you for this username and password.

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Tip: If you wish to add more administrative users, add them to the "admin" group and, optionally, edit the tweak-
params, editusers, creategroups, editcomponents, and editkeywords groups to add the entire admin group to
those groups (which is the case by default).

3.2.2. Managing Other Users

3.2.2.1. Searching for existing users

If you have “editusers” privileges or if you are allowed to grant privileges for some groups, the “Users” link appears
in the footer.
The first screen you get is a search form to search for existing user accounts. You can run searches based either on
the ID, real name or login name (i.e. the email address in most cases) of users. You can search in different ways the
listbox to the right of the text entry box. You can match by case-insensitive substring (the default), regular expression,
a reverse regular expression match, which finds every user name which does NOT match the regular expression, or
the exact string if you know exactly who you are looking for.
You can also restrict your search to users being in some specific group. By default, the restriction is turned off. Then
you get a list of users matching your critera, and clicking their login name lets you edit their properties.

3.2.2.2. Creating new users

3.2.2.2.1. Self-registration
By default, users can create their own user accounts by clicking the “New Account” link at the bottom of each
page (assuming they aren’t logged in as someone else already). If you want to disable this self-registration, or if
you want to restrict who can create his own user account, you have to edit the “createemailregexp” parameter in the
“Configuration” page, see Section 3.1.

3.2.2.2.2. Accounts created by an administrator

Users with “editusers” privileges, such as administrators, can create user accounts for other users:

1. After logging in, click the "Users" link at the footer of the query page, and then click "Add a new user".
2. Fill out the form presented. This page is self-explanatory. When done, click "Submit".

Note: Adding a user this way will not send an email informing them of their username and password. While
useful for creating dummy accounts (watchers which shuttle mail to another system, for instance, or email
addresses which are a mailing list), in general it is preferable to log out and use the “New Account” button to
create users, as it will pre-populate all the required fields and also notify the user of her account name and
password.

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3.2.2.3. Modifying Users

Once you have found your user, you can change the following fields:

• Login Name: This is generally the user’s full email address. However, if you have are using the “emailsuffix”
parameter, this may just be the user’s login name. Note that users can now change their login names themselves (to
any valid email address).
• Real Name: The user’s real name. Note that Bugzilla does not require this to create an account.
• Password: You can change the user’s password here. Users can automatically request a new password, so you
shouldn’t need to do this often. If you want to disable an account, see Disable Text below.
• Disable Text: If you type anything in this box, including just a space, the user is prevented from logging in, or
making any changes to bugs via the web interface. The HTML you type in this box is presented to the user when
they attempt to perform these actions, and should explain why the account was disabled.
Users with disabled accounts will continue to receive mail from Bugzilla; furthermore, they will not be able to
log in themselves to change their own preferences and stop it. If you want an account (disabled or active) to stop
receiving mail, add the account name (one account per line) to the file data/nomail.

Note: Even users whose accounts have been disabled can still submit bugs via the e-mail gateway, if one exists.
The e-mail gateway should not be enabled for secure installations of Bugzilla.

Warning
Don’t disable all the administrator accounts!

• <groupname>: If you have created some groups, e.g. "securitysensitive", then checkboxes will appear here to allow
you to add users to, or remove them from, these groups.
• canconfirm: This field is only used if you have enabled the "unconfirmed" status. If you enable this for a user, that
user can then move bugs from "Unconfirmed" to a "Confirmed" status (e.g.: "New" status).
• creategroups: This option will allow a user to create and destroy groups in Bugzilla.
• editbugs: Unless a user has this bit set, they can only edit those bugs for which they are the assignee or the reporter.
Even if this option is unchecked, users can still add comments to bugs.
• editcomponents: This flag allows a user to create new products and components, as well as modify and destroy
those that have no bugs associated with them. If a product or component has bugs associated with it, those bugs
must be moved to a different product or component before Bugzilla will allow them to be destroyed.
• editkeywords: If you use Bugzilla’s keyword functionality, enabling this feature allows a user to create and destroy
keywords. As always, the keywords for existing bugs containing the keyword the user wishes to destroy must be
changed before Bugzilla will allow it to die.
• editusers: This flag allows a user to do what you’re doing right now: edit other users. This will allow those with the
right to do so to remove administrator privileges from other users or grant them to themselves. Enable with care.
• tweakparams: This flag allows a user to change Bugzilla’s Params (using editparams.cgi.)

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• <productname>: This allows an administrator to specify the products in which a user can see bugs. The user must
still have the "editbugs" privilege to edit bugs in these products.

3.2.2.4. Deleting Users

If the “allowuserdeletion” parameter is turned on, see Section 3.1, then you can also delete user accounts. Note that
this is most of the time not the best thing to do. If only a warning in a yellow box is displayed, then the deletion is
safe. If a warning is also displayed in a red box, then you should NOT try to delete the user account, else you will get
referential integrity problems in your database, which can lead to unexpected behavior, such as bugs not appearing in
bug lists anymore, or data displaying incorrectly. You have been warned!

3.2.2.5. Impersonating Users

There may be times when an administrator would like to do something as another user. The sudo feature may be used
to do this.

Note: To use the sudo feature, you must be in the bz_sudoers group. By default, all administrators are in this
group.

If you have access to this feature, you may start a session by going to the Edit Users page, Searching for a user and
clicking on their login. You should see a link below their login name titled "Impersonate this user". Click on the link.
This will take you to a page where you will see a description of the feature and instructions for using it. After reading
the text, simply enter the login of the user you would like to impersonate, provide a short message explaining why
you are doing this, and press the button.
As long as you are using this feature, everything you do will be done as if you were logged in as the user you are
impersonating.

Warning
The user you are impersonating will not be told about what you are doing. If you do anything that results in
mail being sent, that mail will appear to be from the user you are impersonating. You should be extremely
careful while using this feature.

3.3. Classifications
Classifications tend to be used in order to group several related products into one distinct entity.
The classifications layer is disabled by default; it can be turned on or off using the useclassification parameter, in the
Bug Fields section of the edit parameters screen.
Access to the administration of classifications is controlled using the editclassifications system group, which defines
a privilege for creating, destroying, and editing classifications.

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When activated, classifications will introduce an additional step when filling bugs (dedicated to classification selec-
tion), and they will also appear in the advanced search form.

3.4. Products
Products tend to represent real-world shipping products. E.g. if your company makes computer games, you should
have one product per game, perhaps a "Common" product for units of technology used in multiple games, and maybe
a few special products (Website, Administration...)
Many of Bugzilla’s settings are configurable on a per-product basis. The number of "votes" available to users is set
per-product, as is the number of votes required to move a bug automatically from the UNCONFIRMED status to the
NEW status.
To create a new product:

1. Select "products" from the footer

2. Select the "Add" link in the bottom right
3. Enter the name of the product and a description. The Description field may contain HTML.
Don’t worry about the "Closed for bug entry", "Maximum Votes per person", "Maximum votes a person can put on
a single bug", "Number of votes a bug in this Product needs to automatically get out of the UNCONFIRMED state",
and "Version" options yet. We’ll cover those in a few moments.

3.5. Components
Components are subsections of a Product. E.g. the computer game you are designing may have a "UI" component, an
"API" component, a "Sound System" component, and a "Plugins" component, each overseen by a different program-
mer. It often makes sense to divide Components in Bugzilla according to the natural divisions of responsibility within
your Product or company.
Each component has a default assignee and (if you turned it on in the parameters), a QA Contact. The default assignee
should be the primary person who fixes bugs in that component. The QA Contact should be the person who will ensure
these bugs are completely fixed. The Assignee, QA Contact, and Reporter will get email when new bugs are created in
this Component and when these bugs change. Default Assignee and Default QA Contact fields only dictate the default
assignments; these can be changed on bug submission, or at any later point in a bug’s life.
To create a new Component:

1. Select the "Edit components" link from the "Edit product" page
2. Select the "Add" link in the bottom right.
3. Fill out the "Component" field, a short "Description", the "Default Assignee" and "Default QA Contact" (if
enabled.) The Component and Description fields may contain HTML; the "Default Assignee" field must be a
login name already existing in the database.

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3.6. Versions
Versions are the revisions of the product, such as "Flinders 3.1", "Flinders 95", and "Flinders 2000". Version is not a
multi-select field; the usual practice is to select the earliest version known to have the bug.
To create and edit Versions:

1. From the "Edit product" screen, select "Edit Versions"

2. You will notice that the product already has the default version "undefined". Click the "Add" link in the bottom
right.
3. Enter the name of the Version. This field takes text only. Then click the "Add" button.

3.7. Milestones
Milestones are "targets" that you plan to get a bug fixed by. For example, you have a bug that you plan to fix for your
3.0 release, it would be assigned the milestone of 3.0.

Note: Milestone options will only appear for a Product if you turned on the "usetargetmilestone" Param in the "Edit
Parameters" screen.

To create new Milestones, set Default Milestones, and set Milestone URL:

1. Select "Edit milestones" from the "Edit product" page.

2. Select "Add" in the bottom right corner. text
3. Enter the name of the Milestone in the "Milestone" field. You can optionally set the "sortkey", which is a positive
or negative number (-32768 to 32767) that defines where in the list this particular milestone appears. This is
because milestones often do not occur in alphanumeric order For example, "Future" might be after "Release 1.2".
Select "Add".
4. From the Edit product screen, you can enter the URL of a page which gives information about your milestones
and what they mean.

3.8. Flags
Flags are a way to attach a specific status to a bug or attachment, either “+” or “-”. The meaning of these symbols
depends on the text the flag itself, but contextually they could mean pass/fail, accept/reject, approved/denied, or even
a simple yes/no. If your site allows requestable flags, then users may set a flag to “?” as a request to another user that
they look at the bug/attachment, and set the flag to its correct status.

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3.8.1. A Simple Example

A developer might want to ask their manager, “Should we fix this bug before we release version 2.0?” They might
want to do this for a lot of bugs, so it would be nice to streamline the process...
In Bugzilla, it would work this way:

1. The Bugzilla administrator creates a flag type called “blocking2.0” that shows up on all bugs in your product.
It shows up on the “Show Bug” screen as the text “blocking2.0” with a drop-down box next to it. The drop-down
box contains four values: an empty space, “?”, “-”, and “+”.

2. The developer sets the flag to “?”.

3. The manager sees the blocking2.0 flag with a “?” value.
4. If the manager thinks the feature should go into the product before version 2.0 can be released, he sets the flag to
“+”. Otherwise, he sets it to “-”.
5. Now, every Bugzilla user who looks at the bug knows whether or not the bug needs to be fixed before release of
version 2.0.

3.8.2. About Flags

3.8.2.1. Values
Flags can have three values:

A user is requesting that a status be set. (Think of it as ’A question is being asked’.)

The status has been set negatively. (The question has been answered “no”.)

+
The status has been set positively. (The question has been answered “yes”.)

Actually, there’s a fourth value a flag can have -- “unset” -- which shows up as a blank space. This just means that
nobody has expressed an opinion (or asked someone else to express an opinion) about this bug or attachment.

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3.8.3. Using flag requests

If a flag has been defined as ’requestable’, and a user has enough privileges to request it (see below), the user can set
the flag’s status to “?”. This status indicates that someone (a.k.a. “the requester”) is asking someone else to set the flag
to either “+” or “-”.
If a flag has been defined as ’specifically requestable’, a text box will appear next to the flag into which the requester
may enter a Bugzilla username. That named person (a.k.a. “the requestee”) will receive an email notifying them of
the request, and pointing them to the bug/attachment in question.
If a flag has not been defined as ’specifically requestable’, then no such text-box will appear. A request to set this flag
cannot be made of any specific individual, but must be asked “to the wind”. A requester may “ask the wind” on any
flag simply by leaving the text-box blank.

3.8.4. Two Types of Flags

Flags can go in two places: on an attachment, or on a bug.

3.8.4.1. Attachment Flags

Attachment flags are used to ask a question about a specific attachment on a bug.
Many Bugzilla installations use this to request that one developer “review” another developer’s code before
they check it in. They attach the code to a bug report, and then set a flag on that attachment called “review” to
[email protected]. [email protected] is then notified by email that he has to check out that attachment
and approve it or deny it.
For a Bugzilla user, attachment flags show up in three places:

1. On the list of attachments in the “Show Bug” screen, you can see the current state of any flags that have been set
to ?, +, or -. You can see who asked about the flag (the requester), and who is being asked (the requestee).
2. When you “Edit” an attachment, you can see any settable flag, along with any flags that have already been set.
This “Edit Attachment” screen is where you set flags to ?, -, +, or unset them.
3. Requests are listed in the “Request Queue”, which is accessible from the “My Requests” link (if you are logged
in) or “Requests” link (if you are logged out) visible in the footer of all pages.

3.8.4.2. Bug Flags

Bug flags are used to set a status on the bug itself. You can see Bug Flags in the “Show Bug” and “Requests” screens,
as described above.
Only users with enough privileges (see below) may set flags on bugs. This doesn’t necessarily include the assignee,
reporter, or users with the editbugs permission.

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3.8.5. Administering Flags

If you have the “editcomponents” permission, you will have “Edit: ... | Flags | ...” in your page footer. Clicking on that
link will bring you to the “Administer Flag Types” page. Here, you can select whether you want to create (or edit) a
Bug flag, or an Attachment flag.
No matter which you choose, the interface is the same, so we’ll just go over it once.

3.8.5.1. Creating a Flag

When you click on the “Create a Flag Type for...” link, you will be presented with a form. Here is what the fields in
the form mean:

3.8.5.1.1. Name
This is the name of the flag. This will be displayed to Bugzilla users who are looking at or setting the flag. The name
may contain any valid Unicode characters except commas and spaces.

3.8.5.1.2. Description
The description describes the flag in more detail. It is visible in a tooltip when hovering over a flag either in the “Show
Bug” or “Edit Attachment” pages. This field can be as long as you like, and can contain any character you want.

3.8.5.1.3. Category
Default behaviour for a newly-created flag is to appear on products and all components, which is why
“__Any__:__Any__” is already entered in the “Inclusions” box. If this is not your desired behaviour, you must
either set some exclusions (for products on which you don’t want the flag to appear), or you must remove
“__Any__:__Any__” from the Inclusions box and define products/components specifically for this flag.
To create an Inclusion, select a Product from the top drop-down box. You may also select a specific component
from the bottom drop-down box. (Setting “__Any__” for Product translates to, “all the products in this Bugzilla”.
Selecting “__Any__” in the Component field means “all components in the selected product.”) Selections made, press
“Include”, and your Product/Component pairing will show up in the “Inclusions” box on the right.
To create an Exclusion, the process is the same; select a Product from the top drop-down box, select a specific
component if you want one, and press “Exclude”. The Product/Component pairing will show up in the “Exclusions”
box on the right.
This flag will and can be set for any products/components that appearing in the “Inclusions” box (or which fall under
the appropriate “__Any__”). This flag will not appear (and therefore cannot be set) on any products appearing in the
“Exclusions” box. IMPORTANT: Exclusions override inclusions.
You may select a Product without selecting a specific Component, but you can’t select a Component without a Product,
or to select a Component that does not belong to the named Product. If you do so, Bugzilla will display an error
message, even if all your products have a component by that name.
Example: Let’s say you have a product called “Jet Plane” that has thousands of components. You want to be able to
ask if a problem should be fixed in the next model of plane you release. We’ll call the flag “fixInNext”. But, there’s
one component in “Jet Plane,” called “Pilot.” It doesn’t make sense to release a new pilot, so you don’t want to have
the flag show up in that component. So, you include “Jet Plane:__Any__” and you exclude “Jet Plane:Pilot”.

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3.8.5.1.4. Sort Key

Flags normally show up in alphabetical order. If you want them to show up in a different order, you can use this key
set the order on each flag. Flags with a lower sort key will appear before flags with a higher sort key. Flags that have
the same sort key will be sorted alphabetically, but they will still be after flags with a lower sort key, and before flags
with a higher sort key.
Example: I have AFlag (Sort Key 100), BFlag (Sort Key 10), CFlag (Sort Key 10), and DFlag (Sort Key 1). These
show up in the order: DFlag, BFlag, CFlag, AFlag.

3.8.5.1.5. Active
Sometimes, you might want to keep old flag information in the Bugzilla database, but stop users from setting any new
flags of this type. To do this, uncheck “active”. Deactivated flags will still show up in the UI if they are ?, +, or -, but
they may only be cleared (unset), and cannot be changed to a new value. Once a deactivated flag is cleared, it will
completely disappear from a bug/attachment, and cannot be set again.

3.8.5.1.6. Requestable
New flags are, by default, “requestable”, meaning that they offer users the “?” option, as well as “+” and “-”. To
remove the ? option, uncheck “requestable”.

3.8.5.1.7. Specifically Requestable

By default this box is checked for new flags, meaning that users may make flag requests of specific individuals.
Unchecking this box will remove the text box next to a flag; if it is still requestable, then requests may only be made
“to the wind.” Removing this after specific requests have been made will not remove those requests; that data will
stay in the database (though it will no longer appear to the user).

3.8.5.1.8. Multiplicable
Any flag with “Multiplicable” set (default for new flags is ’on’) may be set more than once. After being set once, an
unset flag of the same type will appear below it with “addl.” (short for “additional”) before the name. There is no limit
to the number of times a Multiplicable flags may be set on the same bug/attachment.

3.8.5.1.9. CC List
If you want certain users to be notified every time this flag is set to ?, -, +, or unset, add them here. This is a comma-
separated list of email addresses that need not be restricted to Bugzilla usernames.

3.8.5.1.10. Grant Group

When this field is set to some given group, only users in the group can set the flag to “+” and “-”. This field does not
affect who can request or cancel the flag. For that, see the “Request Group” field below. If this field is left blank, all
users can set or delete this flag. This field is useful for restricting which users can approve or reject requests.

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3.8.5.1.11. Request Group

When this field is set to some given group, only users in the group can request or cancel this flag. Note that this field
has no effect if the “grant group” field is empty. You can set the value of this field to a different group, but both fields
have to be set to a group for this field to have an effect.

3.8.5.2. Deleting a Flag

When you are at the “Administer Flag Types” screen, you will be presented with a list of Bug flags and a list of
Attachment Flags.
To delete a flag, click on the “Delete” link next to the flag description.

Warning
Once you delete a flag, it is gone from your Bugzilla. All the data for that flag will be deleted. Everywhere
that flag was set, it will disappear, and you cannot get that data back. If you want to keep flag data, but don’t
want anybody to set any new flags or change current flags, unset “active” in the flag Edit form.

3.8.5.3. Editing a Flag

To edit a flag’s properties, just click on the “Edit” link next to the flag’s description. That will take you to the same
form described in the “Creating a Flag” section.

3.9. Legal Values

Since Bugzilla 2.20 RC1, legal values for Operating Systems, platforms, bug priorities and severities can be edited
from the User Interface directly. This means that it is no longer required to manually edit localconfig.

3.9.1. Viewing/Editing legal values

Editing legal values requires “editcomponents” privileges. A link named “Field Values” is visible in your footer and
clicking on it displays the list of fields whose values can be edited.
You can add as many legal values as you want, and each value must be unique (on a per field basis). The sortkey is
important to display these values in the desired order.

3.9.2. Deleting legal values

You can also delete legal values, but only if the two following conditions are respected:

1. The value is not used by default for the field.

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2. No bug is currently using this value.

If any of these conditions is not respected, the value cannot be deleted. The only way to delete these values is to
reassign bugs to another value and to set another value as default for the field.

3.10. Voting
Voting allows users to be given a pot of votes which they can allocate to bugs, to indicate that they’d like them
fixed. This allows developers to gauge user need for a particular enhancement or bugfix. By allowing bugs with a
certain number of votes to automatically move from "UNCONFIRMED" to "NEW", users of the bug system can help
high-priority bugs garner attention so they don’t sit for a long time awaiting triage.
To modify Voting settings:

1. Navigate to the "Edit product" screen for the Product you wish to modify
2. Maximum Votes per person: Setting this field to "0" disables voting.
3. Maximum Votes a person can put on a single bug: It should probably be some number lower than the "Maximum
votes per person". Don’t set this field to "0" if "Maximum votes per person" is non-zero; that doesn’t make any
sense.
4. Number of votes a bug in this product needs to automatically get out of the UNCONFIRMED state: Setting this
field to "0" disables the automatic move of bugs from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
5. Once you have adjusted the values to your preference, click "Update".

3.11. Quips
Quips are small text messages that can be configured to appear next to search results. A Bugzilla installation can have
its own specific quips. Whenever a quip needs to be displayed, a random selection is made from the pool of already
existing quips.
Quips are controlled by the enablequips parameter. It has several possible values: on, approved, frozen or off. In order
to enable quips approval you need to set this parameter to "approved". In this way, users are free to submit quips for
addition but an administrator must explicitly approve them before they are actually used.
In order to see the user interface for the quips, it is enough to click on a quip when it is displayed together with the
search results. Or it can be seen directly in the browser by visiting the quips.cgi URL (prefixed with the usual web
location of the Bugzilla installation). Once the quip interface is displayed, it is enough to click the "view and edit the
whole quip list" in order to see the administration page. A page with all the quips available in the database will be
displayed.
Next to each tip there is a checkbox, under the "Approved" column. Quips who have this checkbox checked are already
approved and will appear next to the search results. The ones that have it unchecked are still preserved in the database
but they will not appear on search results pages. User submitted quips have initially the checkbox unchecked.
Also, there is a delete link next to each quip, which can be used in order to permanently delete a quip.

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3.12. Groups and Group Security

Groups allow the administrator to isolate bugs or products that should only be seen by certain people. The association
between products and groups is controlled from the product edit page under “Edit Group Controls.”
If the makeproductgroups param is on, a new group will be automatically created for every new product. It is primarily
available for backward compatibility with older sites.
Note that group permissions are such that you need to be a member of all the groups a bug is in, for whatever reason,
to see that bug. Similarly, you must be a member of all of the entry groups for a product to add bugs to a product and
you must be a member of all of the canedit groups for a product in order to make any change to bugs in that product.

Note: By default, bugs can also be seen by the Assignee, the Reporter, and by everyone on the CC List, regardless
of whether or not the bug would typically be viewable by them. Visibility to the Reporter and CC List can be
overridden (on a per-bug basis) by bringing up the bug, finding the section that starts with “Users in the roles
selected below...” and un-checking the box next to either ’Reporter’ or ’CC List’ (or both).

3.12.1. Creating Groups

To create Groups:

1. Select the “groups” link in the footer.

2. Take a moment to understand the instructions on the “Edit Groups” screen, then select the “Add Group” link.
3. Fill out the “Group”, “Description”, and “User RegExp” fields. “User RegExp” allows you to automatically place
all users who fulfill the Regular Expression into the new group. When you have finished, click “Add”.
Users whose email addresses match the regular expression will automatically be members of the group as long as
their email addresses continue to match the regular expression.

Note: This is a change from 2.16 where the regular expression resulted in a user acquiring permanent
membership in a group. To remove a user from a group the user was in due to a regular expression in version
2.16 or earlier, the user must be explicitly removed from the group. This can easily be done by pressing
buttons named ’Remove Memberships’ or ’Remove Memberships included in regular expression’ under the
table.

Warning
If specifying a domain in the regexp, make sure you end the regexp with a $.
Otherwise, when granting access to "@mycompany\.com", you will allow access to
’[email protected]’. You need to use ’@mycompany\.com$’ as the regexp.

4. If you plan to use this group to directly control access to bugs, check the "use for bugs" box. Groups not used for
bugs are still useful because other groups can include the group as a whole.

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5. After you add your new group, edit the new group. On the edit page, you can specify other groups that should be
included in this group and which groups should be permitted to add and delete users from this group.

3.12.2. Assigning Users to Groups

Users can become a member of a group in several ways.

1. The user can be explicitly placed in the group by editing the user’s own profile
2. The group can include another group of which the user is a member.
3. The user’s email address can match a regular expression that the group specifies to automatically grant member-
ship to the group.

3.12.3. Assigning Group Controls to Products

On the product edit page, there is a page to edit the “Group Controls” for a product. This allows you to configure how
a group relates to the product. Groups may be applicable, default, and mandatory as well as used to control entry or
used to make bugs in the product totally read-only unless the group restrictions are met.
For each group, it is possible to specify if membership in that group is...

1. required for bug entry,

2. Not applicable to this product(NA), a possible restriction for a member of the group to place on a bug in this
product(Shown), a default restriction for a member of the group to place on a bug in this product(Default), or a
mandatory restriction to be placed on bugs in this product(Mandatory).
3. Not applicable by non-members to this product(NA), a possible restriction for a non-member of the group to
place on a bug in this product(Shown), a default restriction for a non-member of the group to place on a bug in
this product(Default), or a mandatory restriction to be placed on bugs in this product when entered by a non-
member(Mandatory).
4. required in order to make any change to bugs in this product including comments.
These controls are often described in this order, so a product that requires a user to be a member of group "foo" to
enter a bug and then requires that the bug stay restricted to group "foo" at all times and that only members of group
"foo" can edit the bug even if they otherwise could see the bug would have its controls summarized by...

foo: ENTRY, MANDATORY/MANDATORY, CANEDIT

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3.12.4. Common Applications of Group Controls

3.12.4.1. General User Access With Security Group

To permit any user to file bugs in each product (A, B, C...) and to permit any user to submit those bugs into a security
group....

Product A...
security: SHOWN/SHOWN
Product B...
security: SHOWN/SHOWN
Product C...
security: SHOWN/SHOWN

3.12.4.2. General User Access With A Security Product

To permit any user to file bugs in a Security product while keeping those bugs from becoming visible to anyone outside
the securityworkers group unless a member of the securityworkers group removes that restriction....

Product Security...
securityworkers: DEFAULT/MANDATORY

3.12.4.3. Product Isolation With Common Group

To permit users of product A to access the bugs for product A, users of product B to access product B, and support
staff to access both, 3 groups are needed

1. Support: Contains members of the support staff.

2. AccessA: Contains users of product A and the Support group.
3. AccessB: Contains users of product B and the Support group.
Once these 3 groups are defined, the products group controls can be set to..

Product A...
AccessA: ENTRY, MANDATORY/MANDATORY
Product B...
AccessB: ENTRY, MANDATORY/MANDATORY

Optionally, the support group could be permitted to make bugs inaccessible to the users and could be permitted to
publish bugs relevant to all users in a common product that is read-only to anyone outside the support group. That
configuration could be...

Product A...

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AccessA: ENTRY, MANDATORY/MANDATORY

Support: SHOWN/NA
Product B...
AccessB: ENTRY, MANDATORY/MANDATORY
Support: SHOWN/NA
Product Common...
Support: ENTRY, DEFAULT/MANDATORY, CANEDIT

3.13. Upgrading to New Releases

Upgrading Bugzilla is something we all want to do from time to time, be it to get new features or pick up the latest
security fix. How easy it is to update depends on a few factors:

• If the new version is a revision or a new point release

• How many local changes (if any) have been made

3.13.1. Version Definitions

Bugzilla displays the version you are using at the top of most pages you load. It will look something like ’2.16.7’ or
’2.18rc3’ or ’2.19.1+’. The first number in this series is the Major Version. This does not change very often (that is
to say, almost never); Bugzilla was 1.x.x when it was first created, and went to 2.x.x when it was re-written in perl
in Sept 1998. If/When the major version is changed to 3.x.x, it will signify a significant structural change and will be
accompanied by much fanfare and many instructions on how to upgrade, including a revision to this page. :)
The second number in the version is called the ’minor number’, and a release that changes the minor number is called
a ’point release’. An even number in this position (2.14, 2.16, 2.18, 2.20, etc.) represents a stable version, while an
odd number (2.17, 2.19, etc.) represents a development version. In the past, stable point releases were feature-based,
coming when certain enhancements had been completed, or the Bugzilla development team felt that enough progress
had been made overall. As of version 2.18, however, Bugzilla has moved to a time-based release schedule; current
plans are to create a stable point release every 6 months or so after 2.18 is deployed.
The third number in the Bugzilla version represents a bugfix version. Bugfix Revisions are normally released only to
address security vulnerabilities; in the future, it is likely that the Bugzilla development team will back-port bugfixes
in a new point release to the old point release for a limited period. Once enough of these bugfixes have accumulated
(or a new security vulnerability is identified and closed), a bugfix release will be made. As an example, 2.16.6 was a
bugfix release, and improved on 2.16.5.

Note: When reading version numbers, everything separated by a point (’.’) should be read as a single number.
It is not the same as decimal. 2.14 is newer than 2.8 because minor version 14 is greater than minor version 8.
2.24.11 would be newer than 2.24.9 (because bugfix 11 is greater than bugfix 9. This is confusing to some people
who aren’t used to dealing with software.

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3.13.2. Upgrading - Methods and Procedure

There are three different ways to upgrade your installation.

1. Using CVS (Section 3.13.2.1)

2. Downloading a new tarball (Section 3.13.2.2)
3. Applying the relevant patches (Section 3.13.2.3)
Each of these options has its own pros and cons; the one that’s right for you depends on how long it has been since you
last installed, the degree to which you have customized your installation, and/or your network configuration. (Some
discussion of the various methods of updating compared with degree and methods of local customization can be found
in Section 6.1.2.)
The larger the jump you are trying to make, the more difficult it is going to be to upgrade if you have made local
customizations. Upgrading from 2.18 to 2.18.1 should be fairly painless even if you are heavily customized, but going
from 2.14 to 2.18 is going to mean a fair bit of work re-writing your local changes to use the new files, logic, templates,
etc. If you have done no local changes at all, however, then upgrading should be approximately the same amount of
work regardless of how long it has been since your version was released.

Warning
Upgrading is a one-way process. You should backup your database and current Bugzilla directory before
attempting the upgrade. If you wish to revert to the old Bugzilla version for any reason, you will have to
restore from these backups.

The examples in the following sections are written as though the user were updating to version 2.18.1, but the proce-
dures are the same regardless of whether one is updating to a new point release or simply trying to obtain a new bugfix
release. Also, in the examples the user’s Bugzilla installation is found at /var/www/html/bugzilla. If that is not
the same as the location of your Bugzilla installation, simply substitute the proper paths where appropriate.

3.13.2.1. Upgrading using CVS

Every release of Bugzilla, whether it is a point release or a bugfix, is tagged in CVS. Also, every tarball that has been
distributed since version 2.12 has been created in such a way that it can be used with CVS once it is unpacked. Doing
so, however, requires that you are able to access cvs-mirror.mozilla.org on port 2401, which may not be an option or
a possibility for some users, especially those behind a highly restrictive firewall.

Tip: If you can, updating using CVS is probably the most painless method, especially if you have a lot of local
changes.

The following shows the sequence of commands needed to update a Bugzilla installation via CVS, and a typical series
of results.

bash$ cd /var/www/html/bugzilla
bash$ cvs login
Logging in to :pserver:[email protected]:2401/cvsroot
CVS password: (’anonymous’, or just leave it blank)
bash$ cvs -q update -r BUGZILLA-2_18_1 -dP

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P checksetup.pl
P collectstats.pl
P globals.pl
P docs/rel_notes.txt
P template/en/default/list/quips.html.tmpl
(etc.)

Caution
If a line in the output from cvs update begins with a C, then that represents a file with local changes that
CVS was unable to properly merge. You need to resolve these conflicts manually before Bugzilla (or at least
the portion using that file) will be usable.

3.13.2.2. Upgrading using the tarball

If you are unable (or unwilling) to use CVS, another option that’s always available is to obtain the latest tarball from
the Download Page (http://www.bugzilla.org/download/) and create a new Bugzilla installation from that.
This sequence of commands shows how to get the tarball from the command-line; it is also possible to download it
from the site directly in a web browser. If you go that route, save the file to the /var/www/html directory (or its
equivalent, if you use something else) and omit the first three lines of the example.

bash$ cd /var/www/html
bash$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/webtools/bugzilla-2.18.1.tar.gz
(Output omitted)
bash$ tar xzvf bugzilla-2.18.1.tar.gz
bugzilla-2.18.1/
bugzilla-2.18.1/.cvsignore
bugzilla-2.18.1/1x1.gif
(Output truncated)
bash$ cd bugzilla-2.18.1
bash$ cp ../bugzilla/localconfig* .
bash$ cp -r ../bugzilla/data .
bash$ cd ..
bash$ mv bugzilla bugzilla.old
bash$ mv bugzilla-2.18.1 bugzilla

Warning
The cp commands both end with periods which is a very important detail, it tells the shell that the destination
directory is the current working directory.

This upgrade method will give you a clean install of Bugzilla with the same version as the tarball. That’s fine if you
don’t have any local customizations that you want to maintain, but if you do then you will need to reapply them by
hand to the appropriate files.
It’s worth noting that since 2.12, the Bugzilla tarballs come CVS-ready, so if you decide at a later date that you’d
rather use CVS as an upgrade method, your code will already be set up for it.

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3.13.2.3. Upgrading using patches

If you are doing a bugfix upgrade -- that is, one where only the last number of the revision changes, such as
from 2.16.6 to 2.16.7 -- then you have the option of obtaining and applying a patch file from the Download
Page (http://www.bugzilla.org/download/). This file is made available by the Bugzilla Development Team
(http://www.bugzilla.org/developers/profiles.html), and is a collection of all the bug fixes and security patches that
have been made since the last bugfix release. If you are planning to upgrade via patches, it is safer to grab this
developer-made patch file than to read the patch notes and apply all (or even just some of) the patches oneself, as
sometimes patches on bugs get changed before they get checked in.
As above, this example starts with obtaining the file via the command line. If you have already downloaded it, you
can omit the first two commands.

bash$ cd /var/www/html/bugzilla
bash$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/webtools/bugzilla-2.18.0-to-2.18.1.diff.gz
(Output omitted)
bash$ gunzip bugzilla-2.18.0-to-2.18.1.diff.gz
bash$ patch -p1 < bugzilla-2.18.0-to-2.18.1.diff
patching file checksetup.pl
patching file collectstats.pl
patching file globals.pl
(etc.)

Warning
Be aware that upgrading from a patch file does not change the entries in your CVS directory. This could make
it more difficult to upgrade using CVS (Section 3.13.2.1) in the future.

3.13.3. Completing Your Upgrade

Regardless of which upgrade method you choose, you will need to run ./checksetup.pl before your Bugzilla upgrade
will be complete.

bash$ cd bugzilla
bash$ ./checksetup.pl

Warning
The period at the beginning of the command ./checksetup.pl is important and can not be omitted.

If you have done a lot of local modifications, it wouldn’t hurt to run the Bugzilla Testing suite. This is not a re-
quired step, but it isn’t going to hurt anything, and might help point out some areas that could be improved. (More
information on the test suite can be had by following this link to the appropriate section in the Developers’ Guide
(http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/developer.html#testsuite).)

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While some of the items in this chapter are related to the operating system Bugzilla is running on or some of the support
software required to run Bugzilla, it is all related to protecting your data. This is not intended to be a comprehensive
guide to securing Linux, Apache, MySQL, or any other piece of software mentioned. There is no substitute for active
administration and monitoring of a machine. The key to good security is actually right in the middle of the word: U R
It.
While programmers in general always strive to write secure code, accidents can and do happen. The best approach to
security is to always assume that the program you are working with isn’t 100% secure and restrict its access to other
parts of your machine as much as possible.

4.1. Operating System

4.1.1. TCP/IP Ports

The TCP/IP standard defines more than 65,000 ports for sending and receiving traffic. Of those, Bugzilla needs exactly
one to operate (different configurations and options may require up to 3). You should audit your server and make sure
that you aren’t listening on any ports you don’t need to be. It’s also highly recommended that the server Bugzilla
resides on, along with any other machines you administer, be placed behind some kind of firewall.

4.1.2. System User Accounts

Many daemons, such as Apache’s httpd or MySQL’s mysqld, run as either “root” or “nobody”. This is even worse
on Windows machines where the majority of services run as “SYSTEM”. While running as “root” or “SYSTEM”
introduces obvious security concerns, the problems introduced by running everything as “nobody” may not be so
obvious. Basically, if you run every daemon as “nobody” and one of them gets compromised it can compromise every
other daemon running as “nobody” on your machine. For this reason, it is recommended that you create a user account
for each daemon.

Note: You will need to set the webservergroup option in localconfig to the group your webserver runs as. This
will allow ./checksetup.pl to set file permissions on Unix systems so that nothing is world-writable.

4.1.3. The chroot Jail

If your system supports it, you may wish to consider running Bugzilla inside of a chroot jail. This option provides
unprecedented security by restricting anything running inside the jail from accessing any information outside of it. If
you wish to use this option, please consult the documentation that came with your system.

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4.2. MySQL

4.2.1. The MySQL System Account

As mentioned in Section 4.1.2, the MySQL daemon should run as a non-privileged, unique user. Be sure to consult
the MySQL documentation or the documentation that came with your system for instructions.

4.2.2. The MySQL “root” and “anonymous” Users

By default, MySQL comes with a “root” user with a blank password and an “anonymous” user, also with a blank
password. In order to protect your data, the “root” user should be given a password and the anonymous user should
be disabled.

Example 4-1. Assigning the MySQL “root” User a Password

bash$ mysql mysql

mysql> UPDATE user SET password = password(’new_password’) WHERE user = ’root’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Example 4-2. Disabling the MySQL “anonymous” User

bash$ mysql -u root -p mysql ➊

Enter Password: new_password
mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE user = ”;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

➊ This command assumes that you have already completed Example 4-1.

4.2.3. Network Access

If MySQL and your webserver both run on the same machine and you have no other reason to access MySQL remotely,
then you should disable the network access. This, along with the suggestion in Section 4.1.1, will help protect your
system from any remote vulnerabilities in MySQL.

Example 4-3. Disabling Networking in MySQL

Simply enter the following in /etc/my.cnf:

[mysqld]
# Prevent network access to MySQL.
skip-networking

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4.3. Web server

4.3.1. Disabling Remote Access to Bugzilla Configuration Files

There are many files that are placed in the Bugzilla directory area that should not be accessible from the web. Because
of the way Bugzilla is currently layed out, the list of what should and should not be accessible is rather complicated.
A quick way is to run testserver.pl to check if your web server serves Bugzilla files as expected. If not, you may
want to follow the few steps below.

Tip: Bugzilla ships with the ability to create .htaccess files that enforce these rules. Instructions for enabling
these directives in Apache can be found in Section 2.2.4.1

• In the main Bugzilla directory, you should:

• Block: *.pl, *localconfig*

• In data:
• Block everything
• But allow: duplicates.rdf

• In data/webdot:
• If you use a remote webdot server:
• Block everything
• But allow *.dot only for the remote webdot server

• Otherwise, if you use a local GraphViz:

• Block everything
• But allow: *.png, *.gif, *.jpg, *.map

• And if you don’t use any dot:

• Block everything

• In Bugzilla:
• Block everything

• In template:
• Block everything

Be sure to test that data that should not be accessed remotely is properly blocked. Of particular interest
is the localconfig file which contains your database password. Also, be aware that many editors create
temporary and backup files in the working directory and that those should also not be accessible. For more

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information, see bug 186383 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=186383) or Bugtraq ID 6501

(http://online.securityfocus.com/bid/6501). To test, simply run testserver.pl, as said above.

Tip: Be sure to check Section 2.2.4 for instructions specific to the web server you use.

4.3.2. Using mod_throttle to Prevent a DOS

Note: This section only applies to people who have chosen the Apache webserver. It may be possible to do similar
things with other webservers. Consult the documentation that came with your webserver to find out.

It is possible for a user, by mistake or on purpose, to access the database many times in a row which can
result in very slow access speeds for other users (effectively, a DOS attack). If your Bugzilla installation is
experiencing this problem, you may install the Apache module mod_throttle which can limit connections
by IP address. You may download this module at http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/. Follow the
instructions to install into your Apache install. The command you need is ThrottleClientIP. See the documentation
(http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/) for more information.

4.4. Bugzilla

4.4.1. Prevent users injecting malicious Javascript

If you installed Bugzilla version 2.22 or later from scratch, then the utf8 parameter is switched on
by default. This makes Bugzilla explicitly set the character encoding, following a CERT advisory
(http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/malicious_code_mitigation.html#3) recommending exactly this. The following
therefore does not apply to you; just keep utf8 turned on.
If you’ve upgraded from an older version, then it may be possible for a Bugzilla user to take advantage of character set
encoding ambiguities to inject HTML into Bugzilla comments. This could include malicious scripts. This is because
due to internationalization concerns, we are unable to turn the utf8 parameter on by default for upgraded installations.
Turning it on manually will prevent this problem.

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5.1. Introduction
This section contains information for end-users of Bugzilla. There is a Bugzilla test installation, called Landfill
(http://landfill.bugzilla.org/), which you are welcome to play with (if it’s up). However, not all of the Bugzilla in-
stallations there will necessarily have all Bugzilla features enabled, and different installations run different versions,
so some things may not quite work as this document describes.

5.2. Create a Bugzilla Account

If you want to use Bugzilla, first you need to create an account. Consult with the administrator responsible for
your installation of Bugzilla for the URL you should use to access it. If you’re test-driving Bugzilla, use this URL:
http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.22-branch/.

1. Click the “Open a new Bugzilla account” link, enter your email address and, optionally, your name in the spaces
provided, then click “Create Account” .
2. Within moments, you should receive an email to the address you provided, which contains your login name
(generally the same as the email address), and a password. This password is randomly generated, but can be
changed to something more memorable.
3. Click the “Log In” link in the footer at the bottom of the page in your browser, enter your email address and
password into the spaces provided, and click “Login”.
You are now logged in. Bugzilla uses cookies to remember you are logged in so, unless you have cookies disabled or
your IP address changes, you should not have to log in again.

5.3. Anatomy of a Bug

The core of Bugzilla is the screen which displays a particular bug. It’s a good place to explain some Bugzilla concepts.
Bug 1 on Landfill (http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.22-branch/show_bug.cgi?id=1) is a good example. Note that
the labels for most fields are hyperlinks; clicking them will take you to context-sensitive help on that particular field.
Fields marked * may not be present on every installation of Bugzilla.

1. Product and Component: Bugs are divided up by Product and Component, with a Product having one or more
Components in it. For example, bugzilla.mozilla.org’s "Bugzilla" Product is composed of several Components:

Administration: Administration of a Bugzilla installation.

Bugzilla-General: Anything that doesn’t fit in the other components, or spans multiple components.
Creating/Changing Bugs: Creating, changing, and viewing bugs.
Documentation: The Bugzilla documentation, including The Bugzilla Guide.
Email: Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla.
Installation: The installation process of Bugzilla.
Query/Buglist: Anything to do with searching for bugs and viewing the buglists.

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Reporting/Charting: Getting reports from Bugzilla.

User Accounts: Anything about managing a user account from the user’s perspective. Saved queries, creating accounts, changing
User Interface: General issues having to do with the user interface cosmetics (not functionality) including cosmetic issues, HTML

2. Status and Resolution: These define exactly what state the bug is in - from not even being confirmed as a bug,
through to being fixed and the fix confirmed by Quality Assurance. The different possible values for Status and
Resolution on your installation should be documented in the context-sensitive help for those items.
3. Assigned To: The person responsible for fixing the bug.
4. *QA Contact: The person responsible for quality assurance on this bug.
5. *URL: A URL associated with the bug, if any.
6. Summary: A one-sentence summary of the problem.
7. *Status Whiteboard: (a.k.a. Whiteboard) A free-form text area for adding short notes and tags to a bug.
8. *Keywords: The administrator can define keywords which you can use to tag and categorise bugs - e.g. The
Mozilla Project has keywords like crash and regression.
9. Platform and OS: These indicate the computing environment where the bug was found.
10. Version: The "Version" field is usually used for versions of a product which have been released, and is set to
indicate which versions of a Component have the particular problem the bug report is about.
11. Priority: The bug assignee uses this field to prioritise his or her bugs. It’s a good idea not to change this on other
people’s bugs.
12. Severity: This indicates how severe the problem is - from blocker ("application unusable") to trivial ("minor
cosmetic issue"). You can also use this field to indicate whether a bug is an enhancement request.
13. *Target: (a.k.a. Target Milestone) A future version by which the bug is to be fixed. e.g. The Bugzilla Project’s
milestones for future Bugzilla versions are 2.18, 2.20, 3.0, etc. Milestones are not restricted to numbers, thought
- you can use any text strings, such as dates.
14. Reporter: The person who filed the bug.
15. CC list: A list of people who get mail when the bug changes.
16. *Time Tracking: This form can be used for time tracking. To use this feature, you have to be blessed group
membership specified by the “timetrackinggroup” parameter.
Orig. Est.: This field shows the original estimated time.
Current Est.: This field shows the current estimated time. This number is calculated from “Hours Worked” and “Hours Left”.
Hours Worked: This field shows the number of hours worked.
Hours Left: This field shows the “Current Est.” - “Hours Worked”. This value + “Hours Worked” will become the new Current Es
%Complete: This field shows what percentage of the task is complete.
Gain: This field shows the number of hours that the bug is ahead of the “Orig. Est.”.
Deadline: This field shows the deadline for this bug.
17. Attachments: You can attach files (e.g. testcases or patches) to bugs. If there are any attachments, they are listed
in this section. Attachments are normally stored in the Bugzilla database, unless they are marked as Big Files,
which are stored directly on disk and (unlike attachments kept in the database) may be deleted at some future
time.
18. *Dependencies: If this bug cannot be fixed unless other bugs are fixed (depends on), or this bug stops other bugs
being fixed (blocks), their numbers are recorded here.
19. *Votes: Whether this bug has any votes.
20. Additional Comments: You can add your two cents to the bug discussion here, if you have something worthwhile

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to say.

5.4. Life Cycle of a Bug

The life cycle, also known as work flow, of a bug is currently hardcoded into Bugzilla. Figure 5-1 contains a
graphical repsentation of this life cycle. If you wish to customize this image for your site, the diagram file (../im-
ages/bzLifecycle.xml) is available in Dia’s (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia) native XML format.

Figure 5-1. Lifecycle of a Bugzilla Bug

5.5. Searching for Bugs

The Bugzilla Search page is the interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the

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Bugzilla system. You can play with it here: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.22-branch/query.cgi.

The Search page has controls for selecting different possible values for all of the fields in a bug, as described above.
For some fields, multiple values can be selected. In those cases, Bugzilla returns bugs where the content of the field
matches any one of the selected values. If none is selected, then the field can take any value.
Once you’ve run a search, you can save it as a Saved Search, which appears in the page footer.

5.5.1. Boolean Charts

Highly advanced querying is done using Boolean Charts.
The boolean charts further restrict the set of results returned by a query. It is possible to search for bugs based on
elaborate combinations of criteria.
The simplest boolean searches have only one term. These searches permit the selected left field to be compared using a
selectable operator to a specified value. Using the "And," "Or," and "Add Another Boolean Chart" buttons, additional
terms can be included in the query, further altering the list of bugs returned by the query.
There are three fields in each row of a boolean search.

• Field: the items being searched

• Operator: the comparison operator
• Value: the value to which the field is being compared

5.5.1.1. Pronoun Substitution

Sometimes, a query needs to compare a field containing a user’s ID (such as ReportedBy) with a user’s ID (such as the
user running the query or the user to whom each bug is assigned). When the operator is either "equals" or "notequals",
the value can be "%reporter%", "%assignee%", "%qacontact%", or "%user%." The user pronoun referes to the user
who is executing the query or, in the case of whining reports, the user who will be the recipient of the report. The
reporter, assignee, and qacontact pronouns refer to the corresponding fields in the bug.

5.5.1.2. Negation
At first glance, negation seems redundant. Rather than searching for

NOT("summary" "contains the string" "foo"),

one could search for

("summary" "does not contain the string" "foo").

However, the search

("CC" "does not contain the string" "@mozilla.org")

would find every bug where anyone on the CC list did not contain "@mozilla.org" while

NOT("CC" "contains the string" "@mozilla.org")

would find every bug where there was nobody on the CC list who did contain the string. Similarly, the use of negation
also permits complex expressions to be built using terms OR’d together and then negated. Negation permits queries
such as

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NOT(("product" "equals" "update") OR ("component" "equals" "Documentation"))

to find bugs that are neither in the update product or in the documentation component or

NOT(("commenter" "equals" "%assignee%") OR ("component" "equals" "Documentation"))

to find non-documentation bugs on which the assignee has never commented.

5.5.1.3. Multiple Charts

The terms within a single row of a boolean chart are all constraints on a single piece of data. If you are looking for a
bug that has two different people cc’d on it, then you need to use two boolean charts. A search for

("cc" "contains the string" "foo@") AND ("cc" "contains the string" "@mozilla.org")
would return only bugs with "[email protected]" on the cc list. If you wanted bugs where there is someone on the cc
list containing "foo@" and someone else containing "@mozilla.org", then you would need two boolean charts.

First chart: ("cc" "contains the string" "foo@")

Second chart: ("cc" "contains the string" "@mozilla.org")
The bugs listed will be only the bugs where ALL the charts are true.

5.5.2. Quicksearch
Quicksearch is a single-text-box query tool which uses metacharacters to indicate what is to be searched. For example,
typing "foo|bar" into Quicksearch would search for "foo" or "bar" in the summary and status whiteboard of a bug;
adding ":BazProduct" would search only in that product. You can use it to find a bug by its number or its alias, too.
You’ll find the Quicksearch box in Bugzilla’s footer area. On Bugzilla’s front page, there is an additional Help
(../../page.cgi?id=quicksearch.html) link which details how to use it.

5.5.3. Bug Lists

If you run a search, a list of matching bugs will be returned.
The format of the list is configurable. For example, it can be sorted by clicking the column headings. Other useful
features can be accessed using the links at the bottom of the list:

Long Format: this gives you a large page with a non-editable summary of the fields of each bug.
XML: get the buglist in the XML format.
CSV: get the buglist as comma-separated values, for import into e.g. a spreadsheet.
Feed: get the buglist as an Atom feed. Copy this link into your favorite feed reader. If you are using Firefox, you can also save the list
iCalendar: Get the buglist as an iCalendar file. Each bug is represented as a to-do item in the imported calendar.
Change Columns: change the bug attributes which appear in the list.
Change several bugs at once: If your account is sufficiently empowered, and more than one bug appear in the bug list, this link is disp
Send mail to bug assignees: If more than one bug appear in the bug list and there are at least two distinct bug assignees, this links is di
Edit Search: If you didn’t get exactly the results you were looking for, you can return to the Query page through this link and make sm
Remember Search As: You can give a search a name and remember it; a link will appear in your page footer giving you quick access to

If you would like to access the bug list from another program it is often useful to have the list returned in something
other than HTML. By adding the ctype=type parameter into the bug list URL you can specify several alternate formats.

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Besides the types described above, the following formats are also supported: ECMAScript, also known as JavaScript
(ctype=js), and Resource Description Framework RDF/XML (ctype=rdf).

5.5.4. Adding individual bugs from bug lists

You can at any time add individual bugs to a special type of saved searches, known as “lists of bugs”. The distinction
between both types is that saved searches, as described in the previous section, are stored in the form of a list of
matching criteria, while a list of bugs is an enumerated list of bug numbers. As it is a simple list of bug numbers, you
can easily edit this list by adding bugs to it. To enable this feature, you have to turn on the “Add individual bugs to
saved searches” user preference, see Section 5.10.
This feature is useful when you want to keep track of several bugs, but for different reasons. Instead of adding yourself
to the CC list of all these bugs and mixing all these reasons, you can now store these bugs in different lists, e.g. “Bugs
I want to see fixed before the next release”, “Interesting bugs”, or “Bugs I have to think about”. One big advantage
of this way to manage bug lists is that you can easily add bugs one by one, which is not possible to do with saved
searches without having to edit the search criteria again.

5.6. Filing Bugs

5.6.1. Reporting a New Bug

Years of bug writing experience has been distilled for your reading pleasure into the Bug Writing Guidelines
(http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.22-branch/page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html). While some of the advice is Mozilla-
specific, the basic principles of reporting Reproducible, Specific bugs, isolating the Product you are using, the Version
of the Product, the Component which failed, the Hardware Platform, and Operating System you were using at the time
of the failure go a long way toward ensuring accurate, responsible fixes for the bug that bit you.
The procedure for filing a bug is as follows:

1. Click the “New” link available in the footer of pages, or the “Enter a new bug report” link displayed on the home
page of the Bugzilla installation.

Note: If you want to file a test bug to see how Bugzilla works, you can do it on one of our test installations on
Landfill (http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.22-branch/).

2. You first have to select the product in which you found a bug.
3. You now see a form where you can specify the component (part of the product which is affected by the bug you
discovered; if you have no idea, just select “General” if such a component exists), the version of the program you
were using, the Operarting System and platform your program is running on and the severity of the bug (if the bug
you found crashes the program, it’s probably a major or a critical bug; if it’s a typo somewhere, that’s something
pretty minor; if it’s something you would like to see implemented, then that’s an enhancement).

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4. You now have to give a short but descriptive summary of the bug you found. “My program is crashing all the
time” is a very poor summary and doesn’t help developers at all. Try something more meaningful or your bug will
probably be ignored due to a lack of precision. The next step is to give a very detailed list of steps to reproduce
the problem you encountered. Try to limit these steps to a minimum set required to reproduce the problem. This
will make the life of developers easier, and the probability that they consider your bug in a reasonable timeframe
will be much higher.

Note: Try to make sure that everything in the summary is also in the first comment. Summaries are often
updated and this will ensure your original information is easily accessible.

5. Now is a good time to read your bug report again. Remove all misspellings, otherwise your bug may not be found
by developers running queries for some specific words, and so your bug would not get any attention. Also make
sure you didn’t forget any important information developers should know in order to reproduce the problem, and
make sure your description of the problem is explicit and clear enough. When you think your bug report is ready
to go, the last step is to click the “Commit” button to add your report into the database.
You do not need to put "any" or similar strings in the URL field. If there is no specific URL associated with the bug,
leave this field blank.
If you feel a bug you filed was incorrectly marked as a DUPLICATE of another, please question it in your bug, not
the bug it was duped to. Feel free to CC the person who duped it if they are not already CCed.

5.6.2. Clone an Existing Bug

Starting with version 2.20, Bugzilla has a feature that allows you to clone an existing bug. The newly created bug will
inherit most settings from the old bug. This allows you to track more easily similar concerns in a new bug. To use
this, go to the bug that you want to clone, then click the “Clone This Bug” link on the bug page. This will take you
to the “Enter Bug” page that is filled with the values that the old bug has. You can change those values and/or texts if
needed.

5.7. Attachments
You should use attachments, rather than comments, for large chunks of ASCII data, such as trace, debugging output
files, or log files. That way, it doesn’t bloat the bug for everyone who wants to read it, and cause people to receive fat,
useless mails.
You should make sure to trim screenshots. There’s no need to show the whole screen if you are pointing out a single-
pixel problem.
Bugzilla stores and uses a Content-Type for each attachment (e.g. text/html). To download an attachment as a different
Content-Type (e.g. application/xhtml+xml), you can override this using a ’content_type’ parameter on the URL, e.g.
&content_type=text/plain.

If you have a really large attachment, something that does not need to be recorded forever (as most attachments are),
you can mark your attachment as a “Big File”, assuming the administrator of the installation has enabled this feature.

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Big Files are stored directly on disk instead of in the database, and can be deleted when it is no longer needed. The
maximum size of a “Big File” is normally larger than the maximum size of a regular attachment.
Also, if the administrator turned on the “allow_attach_url” parameter, you can enter the URL pointing to the at-
tachment instead of uploading the attachment itself. For example, this is useful if you want to point to an external
application, a website or a very large file. Note that there is no guarantee that the source file will always be available,
nor that its content will remain unchanged.

5.7.1. Patch Viewer

Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to lack of context, improper format and the inherent
readability issues that raw patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed to fix that by offering
increased context, linking to sections, and integrating with Bonsai, LXR and CVS.
Patch viewer allows you to:

View patches in color, with side-by-side view rather than trying to interpret the contents of the patch.
See the difference between two patches.
Get more context in a patch.
Collapse and expand sections of a patch for easy reading.
Link to a particular section of a patch for discussion or review
Go to Bonsai or LXR to see more context, blame, and cross-references for the part of the patch you are looking at
Create a rawtext unified format diff out of any patch, no matter what format it came from

5.7.1.1. Viewing Patches in Patch Viewer

The main way to view a patch in patch viewer is to click on the "Diff" link next to a patch in the Attachments list
on a bug. You may also do this within the edit window by clicking the "View Attachment As Diff" button in the Edit
Attachment screen.

5.7.1.2. Seeing the Difference Between Two Patches

To see the difference between two patches, you must first view the newer patch in Patch Viewer. Then select the older
patch from the dropdown at the top of the page ("Differences between [dropdown] and this patch") and click the "Diff"
button. This will show you what is new or changed in the newer patch.

5.7.1.3. Getting More Context in a Patch

To get more context in a patch, you put a number in the textbox at the top of Patch Viewer ("Patch / File / [textbox]")
and hit enter. This will give you that many lines of context before and after each change. Alternatively, you can click
on the "File" link there and it will show each change in the full context of the file. This feature only works against files
that were diffed using "cvs diff".

5.7.1.4. Collapsing and Expanding Sections of a Patch

To view only a certain set of files in a patch (for example, if a patch is absolutely huge and you want to only review
part of it at a time), you can click the "(+)" and "(-)" links next to each file (to expand it or collapse it). If you want to

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collapse all files or expand all files, you can click the "Collapse All" and "Expand All" links at the top of the page.

5.7.1.5. Linking to a Section of a Patch

To link to a section of a patch (for example, if you want to be able to give someone a URL to show them which part
you are talking about) you simply click the "Link Here" link on the section header. The resulting URL can be copied
and used in discussion.

5.7.1.6. Going to Bonsai and LXR

To go to Bonsai to get blame for the lines you are interested in, you can click the "Lines XX-YY" link on the section
header you are interested in. This works even if the patch is against an old version of the file, since Bonsai stores all
versions of the file.
To go to LXR, you click on the filename on the file header (unfortunately, since LXR only does the most recent
version, line numbers are likely to rot).

5.7.1.7. Creating a Unified Diff

If the patch is not in a format that you like, you can turn it into a unified diff format by clicking the "Raw Unified"
link at the top of the page.

5.8. Hints and Tips

This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices that have been developed.

5.8.1. Autolinkification
Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text.
However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain sorts of text in comments. For example, the text
"http://www.bugzilla.org" will be turned into a link: http://www.bugzilla.org. Other strings which get linkified in the
obvious manner are:

bug 12345
comment 7
bug 23456, comment 53
attachment 4321
mailto:[email protected]
[email protected]
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org
Most other sorts of URL
A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment, you should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets
autolinkified for the convenience of others.

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5.8.2. Comments
If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if either you have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla
requires it. Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail. To take an example: a user can set up their
account to filter out messages where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug (which happens a lot.) If
you come along, add yourself to the CC field, and add a comment saying "Adding self to CC", then that person gets a
pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.
Don’t use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable, if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style
four line ASCII art creations are not.

5.8.3. Dependency Tree

On the “Dependency tree” page linked from each bug page, you can see the dependency relationship from the bug as
a tree structure.
You can change how much depth to show, and you can hide resolved bugs from this page. You can also collaps/expand
dependencies for each bug on the tree view, using the [-]/[+] buttons that appear before its summary. This option is
not available for terminal bugs in the tree (that don’t have further dependencies).

5.9. Time Tracking Information

Users who belong to the group specified by the “timetrackinggroup” parameter have access to time-related fields.
Developers can see deadlines and estimated times to fix bugs, and can provide time spent on these bugs.
At any time, a summary of the time spent by developers on bugs is accessible either from bug lists when clicking the
“Time Summary” button or from individual bugs when clicking the “Summarize time” link in the time tracking table.
The summarize_time.cgi page lets you view this information either per developer or per bug, and can be split on
a month basis to have greater details on how time is spent by developers.
As soon as a bug is marked as RESOLVED, the remaining time expected to fix the bug is set to zero. This lets QA
people set it again for their own usage, and it will be set to zero again when the bug will be marked as CLOSED.

5.10. User Preferences

Once you have logged in, you can customise various aspects of Bugzilla via the "Edit prefs" link in the page footer.
The preferences are split into three tabs:

5.10.1. Account Preferences

On this tab, you can change your basic account information, including your password, email address and real name.
For security reasons, in order to change anything on this page you must type your current password into the “Pass-
word” field at the top of the page. If you attempt to change your email address, a confirmation email is sent to both
the old and new addresses, with a link to use to confirm the change. This helps to prevent account hijacking.

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5.10.2. General Preferences

This tab allows you to change several Bugzilla behavior.

• Field separator character for CSV files - This controls separator character used in CSV formatted Bug List.
• After changing bugs - This controls which bugs or no bugs are shown in the page after you changed bugs. You can
select the bug you’ve changed this time, or the next bug of the list.
• Add individual bugs to saved searches - this controls whether you can add individual bugs to saved searches or you
can’t.
• When viewing a bug, show comments in this order - This controls the order of comments, you can select below:
Initial description, comment 1, comment 2, ...
Initial description, last comment, ..., comment 2, comment 1.
Initial last comment, ..., comment 2, comment 1, description.
• Show a quip at the top of each bug list - This controls whether a quip will be shown on the Bug list page or not.

5.10.3. Email Preferences

This tab controls the amount of email Bugzilla sends you.
The first item on this page is marked “Users to watch”. When you enter one or more comma-delineated user accounts
(usually email addresses) into the text entry box, you will receive a copy of all the bugmail those users are sent
(security settings permitting). This powerful functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change projects
or users go on holiday.

Note: The ability to watch other users may not be available in all Bugzilla installations. If you don’t see this feature,
and feel that you need it, speak to your administrator.

Each user listed in the “Users watching you” field has you listed in their “Users to watch” list and can get bugmail
according to your relationship to the bug and their “Field/recipient specific options” setting.
In general, users have almost complete control over how much (or how little) email Bugzilla sends them. If you want
to receive the maximum amount of email possible, click the “Enable All Mail” button. If you don’t want to receive
any email from Bugzilla at all, click the “Disable All Mail” button.

Note: Your Bugzilla administrator can stop a user from receiving bugmail by adding the user’s name to the
data/nomail file. This is a drastic step best taken only for disabled accounts, as it overrides the user’s individual
mail preferences.

If you’d like to set your bugmail to something besides ’Completely ON’ and ’Completely OFF’, the “Field/recipient
specific options” table allows you to do just that. The rows of the table define events that can happen to a bug -- things
like attachments being added, new comments being made, the priority changing, etc. The columns in the table define
your relationship with the bug:

• Reporter - Where you are the person who initially reported the bug. Your name/account appears in the “Reporter:”
field.

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• Assignee - Where you are the person who has been designated as the one responsible for the bug. Your name/account
appears in the “Assigned To:” field of the bug.
• QA Contact - You are one of the designated QA Contacts for the bug. Your account appears in the “QA Contact:”
text-box of the bug.
• CC - You are on the list CC List for the bug. Your account appears in the “CC:” text box of the bug.
• Voter - You have placed one or more votes for the bug. Your account appears only if someone clicks on the “Show
votes for this bug” link on the bug.

Note: Some columns may not be visible for your installation, depending on your site’s configuration.

To fine-tune your bugmail, decide the events for which you want to receive bugmail; then decide if you want to
receive it all the time (enable the checkbox for every column), or only when you have a certain relationship with a bug
(enable the checkbox only for those columns). For example: if you didn’t want to receive mail when someone added
themselves to the CC list, you could uncheck all the boxes in the “CC Field Changes” line. As another example, if
you never wanted to receive email on bugs you reported unless the bug was resolved, you would un-check all boxes
in the “Reporter” column except for the one on the “The bug is resolved or verified” row.

Note: Bugzilla adds the “X-Bugzilla-Reason” header to all bugmail it sends, describing the recipient’s relationship
(AssignedTo, Reporter, QAContact, CC, or Voter) to the bug. This header can be used to do further client-side
filtering.

Two items not in the table (“Email me when someone asks me to set a flag” and “Email me when someone sets a flag
I asked for”) define how you want to receive bugmail with regards to flags. Their use is quite straightforward; enable
the checkboxes if you want Bugzilla to send you mail under either of the above conditions.
By default, Bugzilla sends out email regardless of who made the change... even if you were the one responsible for
generating the email in the first place. If you don’t care to receive bugmail from your own changes, check the box
marked “Only email me reports of changes made by other people”.

5.10.4. Permissions
This is a purely informative page which outlines your current permissions on this installation of Bugzilla - what
product groups you are in, and whether you can edit bugs or perform various administration functions.

5.11. Reports and Charts

As well as the standard buglist, Bugzilla has two more ways of viewing sets of bugs. These are the reports (which give
different views of the current state of the database) and charts (which plot the changes in particular sets of bugs over
time.)

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5.11.1. Reports
A report is a view of the current state of the bug database.
You can run either an HTML-table-based report, or a graphical line/pie/bar-chart-based one. The two have different
pages to define them, but are close cousins - once you’ve defined and viewed a report, you can switch between any of
the different views of the data at will.
Both report types are based on the idea of defining a set of bugs using the standard search interface, and then choosing
some aspect of that set to plot on the horizontal and/or vertical axes. You can also get a form of 3-dimensional report
by choosing to have multiple images or tables.
So, for example, you could use the search form to choose "all bugs in the WorldControl product", and then plot their
severity against their component to see which component had had the largest number of bad bugs reported against it.
Once you’ve defined your parameters and hit "Generate Report", you can switch between HTML, CSV, Bar, Line and
Pie. (Note: Pie is only available if you didn’t define a vertical axis, as pie charts don’t have one.) The other controls
are fairly self-explanatory; you can change the size of the image if you find text is overwriting other text, or the bars
are too thin to see.

5.11.2. Charts
A chart is a view of the state of the bug database over time.
Bugzilla currently has two charting systems - Old Charts and New Charts. Old Charts have been part of Bugzilla for a
long time; they chart each status and resolution for each product, and that’s all. They are deprecated, and going away
soon - we won’t say any more about them. New Charts are the future - they allow you to chart anything you can define
as a search.

Note: Both charting forms require the administrator to set up the data-gathering script. If you can’t see any charts,
ask them whether they have done so.

An individual line on a chart is called a data set. All data sets are organised into categories and subcategories. The data
sets that Bugzilla defines automatically use the Product name as a Category and Component names as Subcategories,
but there is no need for you to follow that naming scheme with your own charts if you don’t want to.
Data sets may be public or private. Everyone sees public data sets in the list, but only their creator sees private data
sets. Only administrators can make data sets public. No two data sets, even two private ones, can have the same set
of category, subcategory and name. So if you are creating private data sets, one idea is to have the Category be your
username.

5.11.2.1. Creating Charts

You create a chart by selecting a number of data sets from the list, and pressing Add To List for each. In the List Of
Data Sets To Plot, you can define the label that data set will have in the chart’s legend, and also ask Bugzilla to Sum a
number of data sets (e.g. you could Sum data sets representing RESOLVED, VERIFIED and CLOSED in a particular
product to get a data set representing all the resolved bugs in that product.)

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If you’ve erroneously added a data set to the list, select it using the checkbox and click Remove. Once you add more
than one data set, a "Grand Total" line automatically appears at the bottom of the list. If you don’t want this, simply
remove it as you would remove any other line.
You may also choose to plot only over a certain date range, and to cumulate the results - that is, to plot each one using
the previous one as a baseline, so the top line gives a sum of all the data sets. It’s easier to try than to explain :-)
Once a data set is in the list, one can also perform certain actions on it. For example, one can edit the data set’s
parameters (name, frequency etc.) if it’s one you created or if you are an administrator.
Once you are happy, click Chart This List to see the chart.

5.11.2.2. Creating New Data Sets

You may also create new data sets of your own. To do this, click the "create a new data set" link on the Create Chart
page. This takes you to a search-like interface where you can define the search that Bugzilla will plot. At the bottom
of the page, you choose the category, sub-category and name of your new data set.
If you have sufficient permissions, you can make the data set public, and reduce the frequency of data collection to
less than the default seven days.

5.12. Flags
A flag is a kind of status that can be set on bugs or attachments to indicate that the bugs/attachments are in a certain
state. Each installation can define its own set of flags that can be set on bugs or attachments.
If your installation has defined a flag, you can set or unset that flag, and if your administrator has enabled requesting
of flags, you can submit a request for another user to set the flag.
To set a flag, select either "+" or "-" from the drop-down menu next to the name of the flag in the "Flags" list. The
meaning of these values are flag-specific and thus cannot be described in this documentation, but by way of example,
setting a flag named "review" to "+" may indicate that the bug/attachment has passed review, while setting it to "-"
may indicate that the bug/attachment has failed review.
To unset a flag, click its drop-down menu and select the blank value. Note that marking an attachment as obsolete
automatically cancels all pending requests for the attachment.
If your administrator has enabled requests for a flag, request a flag by selecting "?" from the drop-down menu and
then entering the username of the user you want to set the flag in the text field next to the menu.
A set flag appears in bug reports and on "edit attachment" pages with the abbreviated username of the user who set
the flag prepended to the flag name. For example, if Jack sets a "review" flag to "+", it appears as Jack: review [ + ]
A requested flag appears with the user who requested the flag prepended to the flag name and the user who has been
requested to set the flag appended to the flag name within parentheses. For example, if Jack asks Jill for review, it
appears as Jack: review [ ? ] (Jill).
You can browse through open requests made of you and by you by selecting ’My Requests’ from the footer. You can
also look at open requests limited by other requesters, requestees, products, components, and flag names from this
page. Note that you can use ’-’ for requestee to specify flags with ’no requestee’ set.

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5.13. Whining
Whining is a feature in Bugzilla that can regularly annoy users at specified times. Using this feature, users can execute
saved searches at specific times (i.e. the 15th of the month at midnight) or at regular intervals (i.e. every 15 minutes
on Sundays). The results of the searches are sent to the user, either as a single email or as one email per bug, along
with some descriptive text.

Warning
Throughout this section it will be assumed that all users are members of the bz_canusewhines group,
membership in which is required in order to use the Whining system. You can easily make all users members
of the bz_canusewhines group by setting the User RegExp to ".*" (without the quotes).
Also worth noting is the bz_canusewhineatothers group. Members of this group can create whines for any
user or group in Bugzilla using a extended form of the whining interface. Features only available to members
of the bz_canusewhineatothers group will be noted in the appropriate places.

Note: For whining to work, a special Perl script must be executed at regular intervals. More information on this is
available in Section 2.3.4.

Note: This section does not cover the whineatnews.pl script. See Section 2.3.3 for more information on The
Whining Cron.

5.13.1. The Event

The whining system defines an "Event" as one or more queries being executed at regular intervals, with the results of
said queries (if there are any) being emailed to the user. Events are created by clicking on the "Add new event" button.
Once a new event is created, the first thing to set is the "Email subject line". The contents of this field will be used in
the subject line of every email generated by this event. In addition to setting a subject, space is provided to enter some
descriptive text that will be included at the top of each message (to help you in understanding why you received the
email in the first place).
The next step is to specify when the Event is to be run (the Schedule) and what searches are to be performed (the
Queries).

5.13.2. Whining Schedule

Each whining event is associated with zero or more schedules. A schedule is used to specify when the query (specified
below) is to be run. A new event starts out with no schedules (which means it will never run, as it is not scheduled to
run). To add a schedule, press the "Add a new schedule" button.
Each schedule includes an interval, which you use to tell Bugzilla when the event should be run. An event can be
run on certain days of the week, certain days of the month, during weekdays (defined as Monday through Friday), or
every day.

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Warning
Be careful if you set your event to run on the 29th, 30th, or 31st of the month, as your event may not run
exactly when expected. If you want your event to run on the last day of the month, select "Last day of the
month" as the interval.

Once you have specified the day(s) on which the event is to be run, you should now specify the time at which the
event is to be run. You can have the event run at a certain hour on the specified day(s), or every hour, half-hour, or
quarter-hour on the specified day(s).
If a single schedule does not execute an event as many times as you would want, you can create another schedule for
the same event. For example, if you want to run an event on days whose numbers are divisible by seven, you would
need to add four schedules to the event, setting the schedules to run on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th (one day per
schedule) at whatever time (or times) you choose.

Note: If you are a member of the bz_canusewhineatothers group, then you will be presented with another option:
"Mail to". Using this you can control who will receive the emails generated by this event. You can choose to send
the emails to a single user (identified by email address) or a single group (identified by group name). To send to
multiple users or groups, create a new schedule for each additional user/group.

5.13.3. Whining Queries

Each whining event is associated with zero or more queries. A query is a saved search that is executed on the schedule
specified (see above). You start out with zero queries attached to the event (which means that the event will not run,
as there will never be any results to return). To add a query, press the "Add a new query" button.
The first field to examine in your new query is the Sort field. Queries are executed, and results returned, in the order
specified by the Sort field. Queries with lower Sort values will run before queries with higher Sort values.
The next field to examine is the Search field. This is where you choose the actual search that is to be run. Instead of
defining search parameters here, you are asked to choose from the list of saved searches (the same list that appears
at the bottom of every Bugzilla page). You are only allowed to choose from searches that you have saved yourself
(the default saved search, "My Bugs", is not a valid choice). If you do not have any saved searches, you can take this
opportunity to create one (see Section 5.5.3).

Note: When running queries, the whining system acts as if you are the user executing the query. This means that
the whining system will ignore bugs that match your query, but that you can not access.

Once you have chosen the saved search to be executed, give the query a descriptive title. This title will appear in the
email, above the results of the query. If you choose "One message per bug", the query title will appear at the top of
each email that contains a bug matching your query.
Finally, decide if the results of the query should be sent in a single email, or if each bug should appear in its own
email.

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Warning
Think carefully before checking the "One message per bug" box. If you create a query that matches thou-
sands of bugs, you will receive thousands of emails!

5.13.4. Saving Your Changes

Once you have defined at least one schedule, and created at least one query, go ahead and "Update/Commit". This will
save your Event and make it available for immediate execution.

Note: If you ever feel like deleting your event, you may do so using the "Remove Event" button in the upper-right
corner of each Event. You can also modify an existing event, so long as you "Update/Commit" after completing
your modifications.

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6.1. Template Customization

Administrators can configure the look and feel of Bugzilla without having to edit Perl files or face the nightmare of
massive merge conflicts when they upgrade to a newer version in the future.
Templatization also makes localized versions of Bugzilla possible, for the first time. It’s possible to have Bugzilla’s
UI language determined by the user’s browser. More information is available in Section 6.1.6.

6.1.1. Template Directory Structure

The template directory structure starts with top level directory named template, which contains a directory for
each installed localization. The next level defines the language used in the templates. Bugzilla comes with English
templates, so the directory name is en, and we will discuss template/en throughout the documentation. Below
template/en is the default directory, which contains all the standard templates shipped with Bugzilla.

Warning
A directory data/templates also exists; this is where Template Toolkit puts the compiled versions of the
templates from either the default or custom directories. Do not directly edit the files in this directory, or all
your changes will be lost the next time Template Toolkit recompiles the templates.

6.1.2. Choosing a Customization Method

If you want to edit Bugzilla’s templates, the first decision you must make is how you want to go about doing so. There
are two choices, and which you use depends mainly on the scope of your modifications, and the method you plan to
use to upgrade Bugzilla.
The first method of making customizations is to directly edit the templates found in template/en/default. This
is probably the best way to go about it if you are going to be upgrading Bugzilla through CVS, because if you then
execute a cvs update, any changes you have made will be merged automagically with the updated versions.

Note: If you use this method, and CVS conflicts occur during an update, the conflicted templates (and possibly
other parts of your installation) will not work until they are resolved.

The second method is to copy the templates to be modified into a mirrored directory structure under
template/en/custom. Templates in this directory structure automatically override any identically-named and
identically-located templates in the default directory.

Note: The custom directory does not exist at first and must be created if you want to use it.

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The second method of customization should be used if you use the overwriting method of upgrade, because otherwise
your changes will be lost. This method may also be better if you are using the CVS method of upgrading and are
going to make major changes, because it is guaranteed that the contents of this directory will not be touched during
an upgrade, and you can then decide whether to continue using your own templates, or make the effort to merge your
changes into the new versions by hand.
Using this method, your installation may break if incompatible changes are made to the template interface. Such
changes should be documented in the release notes, provided you are using a stable release of Bugzilla. If you use
using unstable code, you will need to deal with this one yourself, although if possible the changes will be mentioned
before they occur in the deprecations section of the previous stable release’s release notes.

Note: Regardless of which method you choose, it is recommended that you run ./checksetup.pl after creating
or editing any templates in the template/en/default directory, and after editing any templates in the custom
directory.

Warning
It is required that you run ./checksetup.pl after creating a new template in the custom directory. Failure to
do so will raise an incomprehensible error message.

6.1.3. How To Edit Templates

Note: If you are making template changes that you intend on submitting back for inclusion in standard Bugzilla,
you should read the relevant sections of the Developers’ Guide (http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/developer.html).

The syntax of the Template Toolkit language is beyond the scope of this guide. It’s reasonably easy to pick up
by looking at the current templates; or, you can read the manual, available on the Template Toolkit home page
(http://www.template-toolkit.org).
One thing you should take particular care about is the need to properly HTML filter data that has been passed into
the template. This means that if the data can possibly contain special HTML characters such as <, and the data was
not intended to be HTML, they need to be converted to entity form, i.e. &lt;. You use the ’html’ filter in the Template
Toolkit to do this. If you forget, you may open up your installation to cross-site scripting attacks.
Also note that Bugzilla adds a few filters of its own, that are not in standard Template Toolkit. In particular, the
’url_quote’ filter can convert characters that are illegal or have special meaning in URLs, such as &, to the encoded
form, i.e. %26. This actually encodes most characters (but not the common ones such as letters and numbers and so
on), including the HTML-special characters, so there’s never a need to HTML filter afterwards.
Editing templates is a good way of doing a “poor man’s custom fields”. For example, if you don’t use the Status
Whiteboard, but want to have a free-form text entry box for “Build Identifier”, then you can just edit the templates to
change the field labels. It’s still be called status_whiteboard internally, but your users don’t need to know that.

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6.1.4. Template Formats and Types

Some CGI’s have the ability to use more than one template. For example, buglist.cgi can output itself as RDF, or
as two formats of HTML (complex and simple). The mechanism that provides this feature is extensible.
Bugzilla can support different types of output, which again can have multiple formats. In order to request a certain
type, you can append the &ctype=<contenttype> (such as rdf or html) to the <cginame>.cgi URL. If you would
like to retrieve a certain format, you can use the &format=<format> (such as simple or complex) in the URL.
To see if a CGI supports multiple output formats and types, grep the CGI for “get_format”. If it’s not present, adding
multiple format/type support isn’t too hard - see how it’s done in other CGIs, e.g. config.cgi.
To make a new format template for a CGI which supports this, open a current template for that CGI and take note of
the INTERFACE comment (if present.) This comment defines what variables are passed into this template. If there
isn’t one, I’m afraid you’ll have to read the template and the code to find out what information you get.
Write your template in whatever markup or text style is appropriate.
You now need to decide what content type you want your template served as. The content types are defined in the
Bugzilla/Constants.pm file in the contenttypes constant. If your content type is not there, add it. Remember
the three- or four-letter tag assigned to your content type. This tag will be part of the template filename.

Note: After adding or changing a content type, it’s suitable to edit Bugzilla/Constants.pm in order to reflect the
changes. Also, the file should be kept up to date after an upgrade if content types have been customized in the
past.

Save the template as <stubname>-<formatname>.<contenttypetag>.tmpl. Try out the template by calling the
CGI as <cginame>.cgi?format=<formatname>&ctype=<type> .

6.1.5. Particular Templates

There are a few templates you may be particularly interested in customizing for your installation.
index.html.tmpl: This is the Bugzilla front page.
global/header.html.tmpl: This defines the header that goes on all Bugzilla pages. The header includes the banner,
which is what appears to users and is probably what you want to edit instead. However the header also includes the
HTML HEAD section, so you could for example add a stylesheet or META tag by editing the header.
global/banner.html.tmpl: This contains the “banner”, the part of the header that appears at the top of all Bugzilla
pages. The default banner is reasonably barren, so you’ll probably want to customize this to give your installation a
distinctive look and feel. It is recommended you preserve the Bugzilla version number in some form so the version
you are running can be determined, and users know what docs to read.
global/footer.html.tmpl: This defines the footer that goes on all Bugzilla pages. Editing this is another way to quickly
get a distinctive look and feel for your Bugzilla installation.
global/variables.none.tmpl: This defines a list of terms that may be changed in order to “brand” the Bugzilla in-
stance In this way, terms like “bugs” can be replaced with “issues” across the whole Bugzilla installation. The name
“Bugzilla” and other words can be customized as well.
list/table.html.tmpl: This template controls the appearance of the bug lists created by Bugzilla. Editing this template
allows per-column control of the width and title of a column, the maximum display length of each entry, and the wrap

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behaviour of long entries. For long bug lists, Bugzilla inserts a ’break’ every 100 bugs by default; this behaviour is
also controlled by this template, and that value can be modified here.
bug/create/user-message.html.tmpl: This is a message that appears near the top of the bug reporting page. By mod-
ifying this, you can tell your users how they should report bugs.
bug/process/midair.html.tmpl: This is the page used if two people submit simultaneous changes to the same bug. The
second person to submit their changes will get this page to tell them what the first person did, and ask if they wish to
overwrite those changes or go back and revisit the bug. The default title and header on this page read "Mid-air collision
detected!" If you work in the aviation industry, or other environment where this might be found offensive (yes, we
have true stories of this happening) you’ll want to change this to something more appropriate for your environment.
bug/create/create.html.tmpl and bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl: You may not wish to go to the effort of creating
custom fields in Bugzilla, yet you want to make sure that each bug report contains a number of pieces of important
information for which there is not a special field. The bug entry system has been designed in an extensible fashion to
enable you to add arbitrary HTML widgets, such as drop-down lists or textboxes, to the bug entry page and have their
values appear formatted in the initial comment. A hidden field that indicates the format should be added inside the
form in order to make the template functional. Its value should be the suffix of the template filename. For example, if
the file is called create-cust.html.tmpl, then

<input type="hidden" name="format" value="cust">

should be used inside the form.

An example of this is the mozilla.org guided bug submission form (http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-
tip/enter_bug.cgi?product=WorldControl&format=guided). The code for this comes with the Bugzilla
distribution as an example for you to copy. It can be found in the files create-guided.html.tmpl and
comment-guided.html.tmpl.

So to use this feature, create a custom template for enter_bug.cgi. The default template, on which you could
base it, is custom/bug/create/create.html.tmpl. Call it create-<formatname>.html.tmpl, and in it, add
widgets for each piece of information you’d like collected - such as a build number, or set of steps to reproduce.
Then, create a template like custom/bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl, and call it
comment-<formatname>.txt.tmpl. This template should reference the form fields you have created using the
syntax [% form.<fieldname> %]. When a bug report is submitted, the initial comment attached to the bug report
will be formatted according to the layout of this template.
For example, if your custom enter_bug template had a field

<input type="text" name="buildid" size="30">

and then your comment.txt.tmpl had

BuildID: [% form.buildid %]

then something like

BuildID: 20020303

would appear in the initial comment.

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6.1.6. Configuring Bugzilla to Detect the User’s Language

Bugzilla honours the user’s Accept: HTTP header. You can install templates in other languages, and Bugzilla will pick
the most appropriate according to a priority order defined by you. Many language templates can be obtained from
http://www.bugzilla.org/download.html#localizations. Instructions for submitting new languages are also available
from that location.
After untarring the localizations (or creating your own) in the BUGZILLA_ROOT/template directory, you must
update the languages parameter to contain any localizations you’d like to permit. You may also wish to set the
defaultlanguage parameter to something other than “en” if you don’t want English to be the default language.

6.2. Template Hooks

Warning
Template Hooks require Template Toolkit version 2.12 or above, or the application of a patch. See bug
239112 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239112) for details.

Template hooks are a way for extensions to Bugzilla to insert code into the standard Bugzilla templates without
modifying the template files themselves. The hooks mechanism defines a consistent API for extending the standard
templates in a way that cleanly separates standard code from extension code. Hooks reduce merge conflicts and make
it easier to write extensions that work across multiple versions of Bugzilla, making upgrading a Bugzilla installation
with installed extensions easier.
A template hook is just a named place in a standard template file where extension template files for that hook get
processed. Each hook has a corresponding directory in the Bugzilla directory tree. Hooking an extension template
to a hook is as simple as putting the extension file into the hook’s directory. When Bugzilla processes the standard
template and reaches the hook, it will process all extension templates in the hook’s directory. The hooks themselves
can be added into any standard template upon request by extension authors.
To use hooks to extend a Bugzilla template, first make sure there is a hook at the appropriate place within the tem-
plate you want to extend. Hooks appear in the standard Bugzilla templates as a single directive in the format [%
Hook.process("name") %], where name is the unique (within that template) name of the hook.

If you aren’t sure which template you want to extend or just want to browse the available hooks, either use your favorite
multi-file search tool (e.g. grep) to search the standard templates for occurrences of Hook.process or browse the
directory tree in BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/hook/, which contains a directory for each hook in
the following location:
BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/hook/PATH_TO_STANDARD_TEMPLATE/STANDARD_TEMPLATE_NAME/HOOK_NAME/

If there is no hook at the appropriate place within the Bugzilla template you want to extend, file a bug requesting one
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla&component=User%20Interface), specifying:

the template for which you are requesting a hook;

where in the template you would like the hook to be placed (line number/position for latest version of template in CVS or description
the purpose of the hook;
a link to information about your extension, if any.

The Bugzilla reviewers will promptly review each hook request, name the hook, add it to the

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template, check the new version of the template into CVS, and create the corresponding directory in
BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/hook/.

You may optionally attach a patch to the bug which implements the hook and check it in yourself after receiving
approval from a Bugzilla reviewer. The developers may suggest changes to the location of the hook based on their
analysis of your needs or so the hook can satisfy the needs of multiple extensions, but the process of getting hooks
approved and checked in is not as stringent as the process for general changes to Bugzilla, and any extension, whether
released or still in development, can have hooks added to meet their needs.
After making sure the hook you need exists (or getting it added if not), add your extension template to the directory
within the Bugzilla directory tree corresponding to the hook.
That’s it! Now, when the standard template containing the hook is processed, your extension template will be processed
at the point where the hook appears.
For example, let’s say you have an extension named Projman that adds project management capabilities to Bugzilla.
Projman has an administration interface edit-projects.cgi, and you want to add a link to it into the navigation
bar at the bottom of every Bugzilla page for those users who are authorized to administer projects.
The navigation bar is generated by the template file useful-links.html.tmpl, which is located in the global/
subdirectory on the standard Bugzilla template path BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/default/. Looking in
useful-links.html.tmpl, you find the following hook at the end of the list of standard Bugzilla administration
links:

...
[% ’, <a href="editkeywords.cgi">keywords</a>’
IF user.groups.editkeywords %]
[% Hook.process("edit") %]
...

The corresponding directory for this hook is BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/hook/global/useful-links.html.tm

You put a template named projman-edit-projects.html.tmpl into that directory with the following content:

...[% ’, <a href="edit-projects.cgi">projects</a>’ IF user.groups.projman_admins %]

Voila! The link now appears after the other administration links in the navigation bar for users in the projman_admins
group.
Notes:

• You may want to prefix your extension template names with the name of your extension, e.g.
projman-foo.html.tmpl, so they do not conflict with the names of templates installed by other extensions.

• If your extension includes entirely new templates in addition to extensions of standard templates, it should install
those new templates into an extension-specific subdirectory of the BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/
directory. The extension/ directory, like the default/ and custom/ directories, is part of the template search
path, so putting templates there enables them to be found by the template processor.
The template processor looks for templates first in the custom/ directory (i.e. templates added by the specific
installation), then in the extension/ directory (i.e. templates added by extensions), and finally in the default/
directory (i.e. the standard Bugzilla templates). Thus extension templates can override standard templates, but
installation-specific templates override both.

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Note that overriding standard templates with extension templates gives you great power but also makes upgrading
an installation harder. As with custom templates, we recommend using this functionality sparingly and only when
absolutely necessary.

• Installation customizers can also take advantage of hooks when adding code to a Bugzilla template. To do
so, create directories in BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/custom/hook/ equivalent to the directories
in BUGZILLA_ROOT/template/en/extension/hook/ for the hooks you want to use, then place your
customization templates into those directories.
Obviously this method of customizing Bugzilla only lets you add code to the standard templates; you cannot change
the existing code. Nevertheless, for those customizations that only add code, this method can reduce conflicts when
merging changes, making upgrading your customized Bugzilla installation easier.

6.3. Customizing Who Can Change What

Warning
This feature should be considered experimental; the Bugzilla code you will be changing is not stable, and
could change or move between versions. Be aware that if you make modifications as outlined here, you may
have to re-make them or port them if Bugzilla changes internally between versions, and you upgrade.

Companies often have rules about which employees, or classes of employees, are allowed to change certain things in
the bug system. For example, only the bug’s designated QA Contact may be allowed to VERIFY the bug. Bugzilla
has been designed to make it easy for you to write your own custom rules to define who is allowed to make what sorts
of value transition.
For maximum flexibility, customizing this means editing Bugzilla’s Perl code. This gives the administrator complete
control over exactly who is allowed to do what. The relevant function is called CheckCanChangeField(), and is
found in process_bug.cgi in your Bugzilla directory. If you open that file and search for “sub CheckCanChange-
Field”, you’ll find it.
This function has been carefully commented to allow you to see exactly how it works, and give you an idea of how to
make changes to it. Certain marked sections should not be changed - these are the “plumbing” which makes the rest
of the function work. In between those sections, you’ll find snippets of code like:

# Allow the assignee to change anything.

if ($ownerid eq $whoid) {
return 1;
}

It’s fairly obvious what this piece of code does.

So, how does one go about changing this function? Well, simple changes can be made just by removing pieces - for
example, if you wanted to prevent any user adding a comment to a bug, just remove the lines marked “Allow anyone
to change comments.” If you don’t want the Reporter to have any special rights on bugs they have filed, just remove
the entire section that deals with the Reporter.

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More complex customizations are not much harder. Basically, you add a check in the right place in the function, i.e.
after all the variables you are using have been set up. So, don’t look at $ownerid before $ownerid has been obtained
from the database. You can either add a positive check, which returns 1 (allow) if certain conditions are true, or a
negative check, which returns 0 (deny.) E.g.:

if ($field eq "qacontact") {
if (Bugzilla->user->groups("quality_assurance")) {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}

This says that only users in the group "quality_assurance" can change the QA Contact field of a bug.
Getting more weird:

if (($field eq "priority") &&

(Bugzilla->user->email =~ /.*\@example\.com$/))
{
if ($oldvalue eq "P1") {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}

This says that if the user is trying to change the priority field, and their email address is @example.com, they can only
do so if the old value of the field was "P1". Not very useful, but illustrative.

Warning
If you are modifying process_bug.cgi in any way, do not change the code that is bounded by
DO_NOT_CHANGE blocks. Doing so could compromise security, or cause your installation to stop working
entirely.

For a list of possible field names, look in data/versioncache for the list called @::log_columns. If you need
help writing custom rules for your organization, ask in the newsgroup.

6.3.1. Modification in UserInGroup()

The UserInGroup() function in the Bugzilla/User.pm module only accepts one argument since 2.17.5: the name
of a group. This check is now always done against the current user, and a second argument specifying the user ID to
check this group against is no longer valid and an error is thrown if you try to.

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6.4. Modifying Your Running System

Bugzilla optimizes database lookups by storing all relatively static information in the versioncache file, located in
the data/ subdirectory under your installation directory.
If you make a change to the structural data in your database (the versions table for example), or to the “constants”
encoded in defparams.pl, you will need to remove the cached content from the data directory (by doing a rm
data/versioncache), or your changes won’t show up.
versioncache gets regenerated automatically whenever it’s more than an hour old, so Bugzilla will eventually notice
your changes by itself, but generally you want it to notice right away, so that you can test things.

6.5. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools

6.5.1. Bonsai
Bonsai is a web-based tool for managing CVS, the Concurrent Versioning System . Using Bonsai, administrators
can control open/closed status of trees, query a fast relational database back-end for change, branch, and comment
information, and view changes made since the last time the tree was closed. Bonsai also integrates with Tinderbox,
the Mozilla automated build management system.

6.5.2. CVS
CVS integration is best accomplished, at this point, using the Bugzilla Email Gateway.
Follow the instructions in this Guide for enabling Bugzilla e-mail integration. Ensure that your check-in script sends
an email to your Bugzilla e-mail gateway with the subject of “[Bug XXXX]”, and you can have CVS check-in
comments append to your Bugzilla bug. If you want to have the bug be closed automatically, you’ll have to modify
the contrib/bugzilla_email_append.pl script.
There is also a CVSZilla project, based upon somewhat dated Bugzilla code, to integrate CVS and Bugzilla through
CVS’ ability to email. Check it out at: http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/~tonyg/.
Another system capable of CVS integration with Bugzilla is Scmbug. This system provides generic integration of
Source code Configuration Management with Bugtracking. Check it out at: http://freshmeat.net/projects/scmbug/.

6.5.3. Perforce SCM

You can find the project page for Bugzilla and Teamtrack Perforce integration (p4dti) at:
http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti/ . “p4dti” is now an officially supported product from Perforce, and you
can find the "Perforce Public Depot" p4dti page at http://public.perforce.com/public/perforce/p4dti/index.html .
Integration of Perforce with Bugzilla, once patches are applied, is seamless. Perforce replication information will
appear below the comments of each bug. Be certain you have a matching set of patches for the Bugzilla version you
are installing. p4dti is designed to support multiple defect trackers, and maintains its own documentation for it. Please
consult the pages linked above for further information.

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6.5.4. Subversion
Subversion is a free/open-source version control system, designed to overcome various limitations of CVS. Integra-
tion of Subversion with Bugzilla is possible using Scmbug, a system providing generic integration of Source Code
Configuration Management with Bugtracking. Scmbug is available at http://freshmeat.net/projects/scmbug/.

6.5.5. Tinderbox/Tinderbox2
Tinderbox is a continuous-build system which can integrate with Bugzilla - see
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tinderbox for details of Tinderbox, and http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi
to see it in action.

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This FAQ includes questions not covered elsewhere in the Guide.

1. General Questions

1.1. What license is Bugzilla distributed under?

Bugzilla is covered by the Mozilla Public License. See details at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/.

1.2. How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?

http://www.bugzilla.org/support/consulting.html is a list of companies and individuals who have asked us to list
them as consultants for Bugzilla.
There are several experienced Bugzilla hackers on the mailing list/newsgroup who are willing to make them-
selves available for generous compensation. Try sending a message to the mailing list asking for a volunteer.

1.3. What major companies or projects are currently using Bugzilla for bug-tracking?
There are dozens of major companies with public Bugzilla sites to track bugs in their products. We have a
fairly complete list available on our website at http://bugzilla.org/installation-list/. If you have an installation
of Bugzilla and would like to be added to the list, whether it’s a public install or not, simply e-mail Gerv
<[email protected]>.

1.4. Who maintains Bugzilla?

A core team (http://www.bugzilla.org/developers/profiles.html), led by Dave Miller ([email protected]).

1.5. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking databases?

We can’t find any head-to-head comparisons of Bugzilla against other defect-tracking software. If you know
of one, please get in touch. In the experience of Matthew Barnson (the original author of this FAQ), though,
Bugzilla offers superior performance on commodity hardware, better price (free!), more developer-friendly
features (such as stored queries, email integration, and platform independence), improved scalability, greater
flexibility, and superior ease-of-use when compared to commercial bug-tracking software.
If you happen to be a vendor for commercial bug-tracking software, and would like to submit a list of advantages
your product has over Bugzilla, simply send it to <[email protected]> and we’d be happy to
include the comparison in our documentation.

1.6. Why doesn’t Bugzilla offer this or that feature or compatibility with this other tracking software?
It may be that the support has not been built yet, or that you have not yet found it. While Bugzilla makes strides
in usability, customizability, scalability, and user interface with each release, that doesn’t mean it can’t still use
improvement!
The best way to make an enhancement request is to file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla) and set the Severity to ’enhancement’. Your
’request for enhancement’ (RFE) will start out in the UNCONFIRMED state, and will stay there until someone
with the ability to CONFIRM the bug reviews it. If that person feels it to be a good request that fits in with

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Bugzilla’s overall direction, the status will be changed to NEW; if not, they will probably explain why and set
the bug to RESOLVED/WONTFIX. If someone else has made the same (or almost the same) request before,
your request will be marked RESOLVED/DUPLICATE, and a pointer to the previous RFE will be added.
Even if your RFE gets approved, that doesn’t mean it’s going to make it right into the next release; there are
a limited number of developers, and a whole lot of RFEs... some of which are quite complex. If you’re a
code-hacking sort of person, you can help the project along by making a patch yourself that supports
the functionality you require. If you have never contributed anything to Bugzilla before, please be sure
to read the Developers’ Guide (http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/developer.html) and Contributors’ Guide
(http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/contributor.html) before going ahead.

1.7. Why MySQL? I’m interested in seeing Bugzilla run on PostgreSQL/Sybase/Oracle/Msql/MSSQL.

MySQL was originally chosen because it is free, easy to install, and was available for the hardware Netscape
intended to run it on.
There is currently work in progress to make Bugzilla work on PostgreSQL; track the progress of this initiative
in bug 98304 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98304).
Sybase support is no longer being worked on. Even if it eventually happens, it’s VERY unlikely to work without
the end-user-company having to stick a few developers on making several manual changes. Sybase is just NOT
very standards-compliant (despite all the hype), and it turned out that way too much had to be changed to make
it work -- like moving half of the application logic into stored procedures to get any kind of decent performance
out of it. Bug 173130 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=173130) is the relevant bug.
Red Hat once ran a version of Bugzilla that worked on Oracle, but that was long, long ago; that version (Bugzilla
2.8) is now obsolete, insecure, and totally unsupported. Red Hat’s current Bugzilla (based on Bugzilla 2.17.1)
uses PostgreSQL, and work is being done to merge those changes into the main distribution. (See above.) At
this time we know of no recent ports of Bugzilla to Oracle. (In our honest opinion, Bugzilla doesn’t need what
Oracle offers.)
Bug 237862 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237862) is a good bug to read through if you’d like
to see what progress is being made on general database compatibility.

1.8. What is /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl?

Bugzilla used to have the path to perl on the shebang line set to /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl because
when Terry first started writing the code for mozilla.org he needed a version of Perl and other tools that were
completely under his control. This location was abandoned for the 2.18 release in favor of the more sensible
/usr/bin/perl. If you installed an older version of Bugzilla and created the symlink we suggested, you can
remove it now (provided that you don’t have anything else, such as Bonsai, using it and you don’t intend to
reinstall an older version of Bugzilla).

1.9. My perl is located at /usr/local/bin/perl and not /usr/bin/perl. Is there an easy to change that
in all the files that have this hard-coded?
The easiest way to get around this is to create a link from one to the other: ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl.
If that’s not an option for you, the following bit of perl magic will change all the shebang lines (that is to say,
the line at the top of each file that starts with ’#!’ and contains the path) to something else:

perl -pi -e ’s@#\!/usr/bin/perl@#\!/usr/local/bin/perl@’ *cgi *pl

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Sadly, this command-line won’t work on Windows unless you also have Cygwin. However, MySQL comes with
a binary called replace which can do the job:

C:\mysql\bin\replace "#!/usr/bin/perl" "#!C:\perl\bin\perl" -- *.cgi *.pl

Note: If your perl path is something else again, just follow the above examples and replace
/usr/local/bin/perl with your own perl path.

Once you’ve modified all your files, you’ll also need to modify the t/002goodperl.t test, as it tests that
all shebang lines are equal to /usr/bin/perl. (For more information on the test suite, please check out the
appropriate section in the Developers’ Guide (http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/developer.html#testsuite).) Having
done this, run the test itself:

perl runtests.pl 2 --verbose

to ensure that you’ve modified all the relevant files.

If using Apache on Windows, you can avoid the whole problem by setting the ScriptInterpreterSource
(http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#scriptinterpretersource) directive to ’Registry’. (If
using Apache 2 or higher, set it to ’Registry-Strict’.) ScriptInterperterSource requires a registry entry
“HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cgi\Shell\ExecCGI\Command” to associate .cgi files with your perl executable. If
one does not already exist, create it with a default value of “<full path to perl> -T”, e.g. “C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
-T”.

1.10. Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?

At present, no.

1.11. Does bugzilla run under mod_perl?

At present, no. Work is slowly taking place to remove global variables, use $cgi, and use DBI.
These are all necessary for mod_perl (as well as being good for other reasons). Visit bug 87406
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87406) to view the discussion and progress.

2. Managerial Questions

2.1. Is Bugzilla web-based, or do you have to have specific software or a specific operating system on your
machine?
It is web and e-mail based.

2.2. Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and levels? Do we have complete freedom to change
the labels of fields and format of them, and the choice of acceptable values?
Yes. However, modifying some fields, notably those related to bug progression states, also require adjusting the
program logic to compensate for the change.

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There is no GUI for adding fields to Bugzilla at this time. You can follow development of this feature in bug
91037 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91037)

2.3. Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics, graphs, etc? You know, the type of stuff that man-
agement likes to see. :)
Yes. Look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi for samples of what Bugzilla can do in reporting and graphing.
Fuller documentation is provided in Section 5.11.
If you can not get the reports you want from the included reporting scripts, it is possible to hook up a professional
reporting package such as Crystal Reports using ODBC. If you choose to do this, beware that giving direct access
to the database does contain some security implications. Even if you give read-only access to the bugs database
it will bypass the secure bugs features of Bugzilla.

2.4. Is there email notification? If so, what do you see when you get an email?
Email notification is user-configurable. By default, the bug id and summary of the bug report accompany each
email notification, along with a list of the changes made.

2.5. Do users have to have any particular type of email application?

Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format on the planet.

Note: If you decide to use the bugzilla_email integration features to allow Bugzilla to record responses to
mail with the associated bug, you may need to caution your users to set their mailer to “respond to messages
in the format in which they were sent”. For security reasons Bugzilla ignores HTML tags in comments, and
if a user sends HTML-based email into Bugzilla the resulting comment looks downright awful.

2.6. Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If I had outsiders write up a bug report using a MS
Word bug template, could that template be imported into “matching” fields? If I wanted to take the results of a
query and export that data to MS Excel, could I do that?
Bugzilla can output buglists as HTML (the default), CSV or RDF. The link for CSV can be found at the bottom
of the buglist in HTML format. This CSV format can easily be imported into MS Excel or other spreadsheet
applications.
To use the RDF format of the buglist it is necessary to append a &ctype=rdf to the URL. RDF is meant to be
machine readable and thus it is assumed that the URL would be generated programmatically so there is no user
visible link to this format.
Currently the only script included with Bugzilla that can import data is importxml.pl which is intended to be
used for importing the data generated by the XML ctype of show_bug.cgi in association with bug moving.
Any other use is left as an exercise for the user.
There are also scripts included in the contrib/ directory for using e-mail to import information into Bugzilla,
but these scripts are not currently supported and included for educational purposes.

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2.7. Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be used in other countries? Is it localizable?
Yes. For more information including available translated templates, see
http://www.bugzilla.org/download.html#localizations. Some admin interfaces have been
templatized (for easy localization) but many of them are still available in English only. Also, there may be is-
sues with the charset not being declared. See bug 126226 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126266)
for more information.

2.8. Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in Word format? Excel format?
Yes. No. Yes (using the CSV format).

2.9. Are there any backup features provided?

MySQL, the database back-end for Bugzilla, allows hot-backup of data. You can find strategies for dealing with
backup considerations at http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html.

2.10. What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically,
what type of skills does the person need to have? I need to find out what types of individuals would we need to
hire and how much would that cost if we were to go with Bugzilla vs. buying an “out-of-the-box” solution.
If Bugzilla is set up correctly from the start, continuing maintenance needs are minimal and can be done easily
using the web interface.
Commercial Bug-tracking software typically costs somewhere upwards of $20,000 or more for 5-10 floating
licenses. Bugzilla consultation is available from skilled members of the newsgroup. Simple questions are an-
swered there and then.

2.11. What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire people to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this
something that takes hours or days to install and a couple of hours per week to maintain and customize, or is
this a multi-week install process, plus a full time job for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
It all depends on your level of commitment. Someone with much Bugzilla experience can get you up and running
in less than a day, and your Bugzilla install can run untended for years. If your Bugzilla strategy is critical to your
business workflow, hire somebody to who has reasonable Perl skills, and a familiarity with the operating system
on which Bugzilla will be running, and have them handle your process management, bug-tracking maintenance,
and local customization.

2.12. Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using Bugzilla? Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies
needed as identified above?
No. Bugzilla, Perl, the Template Toolkit, and all other support software needed to make Bugzilla work can be
downloaded for free. MySQL -- the database used by Bugzilla -- is also open-source, but they ask that if you
find their product valuable, you purchase a support contract from them that suits your needs.

2.13. We don’t like referring to problems as ’bugs’. Can we change that?

Yes! As of Bugzilla 2.18, it is a simple matter to change the word ’bug’ into whatever word/phrase is used by
your organization. See the documentation on Customization for more details, specifically Section 6.1.5.

3. Administrative Questions

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3.1. Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second
person get a notice that the bug is in use or how are they notified?
Bugzilla does not lock records. It provides mid-air collision detection -- which means that it warns a user when
a commit is about to conflict with commits recently made by another user, and offers the second user a choice
of options to deal with the conflict.

3.2. Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?

Yes, but commits to the database must wait until the tables are unlocked. Bugzilla databases are typically very
small, and backups routinely take less than a minute. If your database is larger, you may want to look into
alternate backup techniques, such as database replication, or backing up from a read-only mirror. (Read up on
these in the MySQL docs on the MySQL site.)

3.3. How can I update the code and the database using CVS?

1. Make a backup of both your Bugzilla directory and the database. For the Bugzilla directory this is as easy
as doing cp -rp bugzilla bugzilla.bak. For the database, there’s a number of options - see the MySQL docs
and pick the one that fits you best (the easiest is to just make a physical copy of the database on the disk,
but you have to have the database server shut down to do that without risking dataloss).
2. Make the Bugzilla directory your current directory.
3. Use cvs -q update -AdP if you want to update to the tip or cvs -q update -dP -rTAGNAME if you want a
specific version (in that case you’ll have to replace TAGNAME with a CVS tag name such as BUGZILLA-
2_16_5).
If you’ve made no local changes, this should be very clean. If you have made local changes, then watch the
cvs output for C results. If you get any lines that start with a C it means there were conflicts between your
local changes and what’s in CVS. You’ll need to fix those manually before continuing.

4. After resolving any conflicts that the cvs update operation generated, running ./checksetup.pl will take care
of updating the database for you as well as any other changes required for the new version to operate.

Warning
Once you run checksetup.pl, the only way to go back is to restore the database back-
ups. You can’t “downgrade” the system cleanly under most circumstances.

See also the instructions in Section 3.13.2.1.

3.4. How do I make it so that bugs can have an UNCONFIRMED status?

To use the UNCONFIRMED status, you must have the ’usevotes’ parameter set to “On”. You must then visit the
editproducts.cgi page and set the “ Number of votes a bug in this product needs to automatically get out
of the UNCONFIRMED state” to be a non-zero number. (You will have to do this for each product that wants
to use the UNCONFIRMED state.) If you do not actually want users to be able to vote for bugs entered against
this product, leave the “Maximum votes per person” value at ’0’.

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There is work being done to decouple the UNCONFIRMED state from the ’usevotes’
parameter for future versions of Bugzilla. Follow the discussion and progress at bug 162060
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162060).

3.5. How do I move a Bugzilla installation from one machine to another?

Use mysqldump to make a backup of the bugs database. For a typical Bugzilla setup, such a command might
look like this:

/usr/bin/mysqldump -u(username) -p(password) --database bugs > bugzilla-backup.txt

See the mysqldump documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/mysqldump.html) for more informa-

tion on using the tool, including how to restore your copy onto the destination machine.

Warning
Depending on the size of your database, and the power of your machine, the mysqldump com-
mand could be running long enough that the password would be visible to someone using the
ps command. If you are on a multi-user machine, and this is a concern to you, create an entry
in the file ~/.my.cnf that looks like this:

[mysqldump]
user=bugs
password=mypassword

and then leave the ’user’ and ’password’ params out of the command line.

On your new machine, follow the instructions found in Chapter 2 as far as setting up the physical environment of
the new machine with perl, webserver, modules, etc. Having done that, you can either: copy your entire Bugzilla
directory from the old machine to a new one (if you want to keep your existing code and modifications), or
download a newer version (if you are planning to upgrade at the same time). Even if you are upgrading to clean
code, you will still want to bring over the localconfig file, and the data directory from the old machine, as
they contain configuration information that you probably won’t want to re-create.

Note: If the location or port number of your SQL server changed as part of the move, you’ll need to update
the appropriate variables in localconfig before taking the next step.

Once you have your code in place, and your database has been restored from the backup you made in step 1,
run checksetup.pl. This will upgrade your database (if necessary), rebuild your templates, etc.

4. Bugzilla Security

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4.1. How do I completely disable MySQL security if it’s giving me problems? (I’ve followed the instructions
in the installation section of this guide...)
Run MySQL like this: mysqld --skip-grant-tables. Please remember that this makes MySQL as secure as taping
a $100 to the floor of a football stadium bathroom for safekeeping.

Warning
This can’t be stressed enough. Doing this is a bad idea. Please consult Section 4.2 of this guide
and the MySQL documentation for better solutions.

4.2. Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?

The Bugzilla code has undergone a reasonably complete security audit, and user-facing CGIs run under Perl’s
taint mode. However, it is recommended that you closely examine permissions on your Bugzilla installation,
and follow the recommended security guidelines found in The Bugzilla Guide.

5. Bugzilla Email

5.1. I have a user who doesn’t want to receive any more email from Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this
user?
The user can stop Bugzilla from sending any mail by unchecking all boxes on the ’Edit prefs’ -> ’Email settings’
page. (As of 2.18,this is made easier by the addition of a ’Disable All Mail’ button.) Alternately, you can add
their email address to the data/nomail file (one email address per line). This will override their personal
preferences, and they will never be sent mail again.

5.2. I’m evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don’t want it to send email to anyone but me. How do I do it?
To disable email, set the mail_delivery_method parameter to none (2.20 and later), or

$enableSendMail

parameter to ’0’ in either BugMail.pm (2.18 and later) or processmail (up to 2.16.x).

Note: Up to 2.16.x, changing

$enableSendMail

will only affect bugmail; email related to password changes, email address changes, bug imports, flag
changes, etc. will still be sent out. As of the final release of 2.18, however, the above step will disable
all mail sent from Bugzilla for any purpose.

To have bugmail (and only bugmail) redirected to you instead of its intended recipients, leave

$enableSendMail

alone; instead, edit the “newchangedmail” parameter as follows:

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• Replace “To:” with “X-Real-To:”

• Replace “Cc:” with “X-Real-CC:”
• Add a “To: %lt;your_email_address>”

5.3. I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something other than new and reopened bugs. How do I do it?
For older versions of Bugzilla, you may be able to apply Klaas Freitag’s patch for “whineatassigned”, which
can be found in bug 6679 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6679). Note that this patch was made in
2000, so it may take some work to apply cleanly to any releases of Bugzilla newer than that, but you can use it
as a starting point.
An updated (and much-expanded) version of this functionality is due to be released as part of Bugzilla 2.20; see
bug 185090 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185090) for the discussion, and for more up-to-date
patches if you just can’t wait.

5.4. How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs via email?
You can find an updated README.mailif file in the contrib/ directory of your Bugzilla distribution that walks
you through the setup.

5.5. Email takes FOREVER to reach me from Bugzilla -- it’s extremely slow. What gives?
If you are using sendmail, try enabling sendmailnow in editparams.cgi. For earlier versions of sendmail,
one could achieve significant performance improvement in the UI (at the cost of delaying the sending of mail)
by setting this parameter to off. Sites with sendmail version 8.12 (or higher) should leave this on, as they will
not see any performance benefit.
If you are using an alternate MTA, make sure the options given in Bugzilla/BugMail.pm and any other place
where sendmail is called are correct for your MTA.

5.6. How come email from Bugzilla changes never reaches me?
Double-check that you have not turned off email in your user preferences. Confirm that Bugzilla is able to send
email by visiting the “Log In” link of your Bugzilla installation and clicking the “Submit Request” button after
entering your email address.
If you never receive mail from Bugzilla, chances are you do not have sendmail in "/usr/lib/sendmail". Ensure
sendmail lives in, or is symlinked to, "/usr/lib/sendmail".
If you are using an MTA other than sendmail the sendmailnow param must be set to on or no mail will be sent.

6. Bugzilla Database

6.1. I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid entries. What do I do?
Run the “sanity check” utility (sanitycheck.cgi) from your web browser to see! If it finishes without er-
rors, you’re probably OK. If it doesn’t come back OK (i.e. any red letters), there are certain things Bugzilla
can recover from and certain things it can’t. If it can’t auto-recover, I hope you’re familiar with mysqladmin

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commands or have installed another way to manage your database. Sanity Check, although it is a good basic
check on your database integrity, by no means is a substitute for competent database administration and avoid-
ing deletion of data. It is not exhaustive, and was created to do a basic check for the most common problems in
Bugzilla databases.

6.2. I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?

There is no facility in Bugzilla itself to do this. It’s also generally not a smart thing to do if you don’t know
exactly what you’re doing. If you understand SQL, though, you can use the mysql command line utility to man-
ually insert, delete and modify table information. There are also more intuitive GUI clients available. Personal
favorites of the Bugzilla team are phpMyAdmin (http://www.phpmyadmin.net/) and MySQL Control Center
(http://www.mysql.com/products/mysqlcc/).
Remember, backups are your friend. Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s nice to have a safety net in case you mess
something up. Consider using mysqldump to make a duplicate of your database before altering it manually.

6.3. I think I’ve set up MySQL permissions correctly, but Bugzilla still can’t connect.
Try running MySQL from its binary: mysqld --skip-grant-tables. This will allow you to completely rule out
grant tables as the cause of your frustration. If this Bugzilla is able to connect at this point then you need to
check that you have granted proper permission to the user password combo defined in localconfig.

Warning
Running MySQL with this command line option is very insecure and should only be done when
not connected to the external network as a troubleshooting step.

6.4. How do I synchronize bug information among multiple different Bugzilla databases?
Well, you can synchronize or you can move bugs. Synchronization will only work one way -- you can create a
read-only copy of the database at one site, and have it regularly updated at intervals from the main database.
MySQL has some synchronization features built-in to the latest releases. It would be great if someone looked
into the possibilities there and provided a report to the newsgroup on how to effectively synchronize two Bugzilla
installations.
If you simply need to transfer bugs from one Bugzilla to another, checkout the “move.pl” script in the Bugzilla
distribution.

7. Bugzilla and Win32

7.1. What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32 (Win98+/NT/2K)?

Remove Windows. Install Linux. Install Bugzilla. The boss will never know the difference. B^)
Seriously though, making Bugzilla work easily with Windows was one of the major goals of the 2.18 milestone.
If the necessary components are in place (perl, a webserver, an MTA, etc.) then installation of Bugzilla on a

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Windows box should be no more difficult than on any other platform. As with any installation, we recommend
that you carefully and completely follow the installation instructions in Section 2.5.1.
While doing so, don’t forget to check out the very excellent guide to Installing Bugzilla on Microsoft Windows
(http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/win32install.html) written by Byron Jones. Thanks, Byron!

7.2. Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?

Not currently. Bundle::Bugzilla enormously simplifies Bugzilla installation on UNIX systems. If someone can
volunteer to create a suitable PPM bundle for Win32, it would be appreciated.

7.3. CGI’s are failing with a “something.cgi is not a valid Windows NT application” error. Why?
Depending on what Web server you are using, you will have to configure the Web server to treat *.cgi files as
CGI scripts. In IIS, you do this by adding *.cgi to the App Mappings with the <path>\perl.exe %s %s as the
executable.
Microsoft has some advice on this matter, as well:

“Set application mappings. In the ISM, map the extension for the script file(s) to the executable for the script interpreter.
For example, you might map the extension .py to Python.exe, the executable for the Python script interpreter. Note For
the ActiveState Perl script interpreter, the extension ’.pl’ is associated with PerlIS.dll by default. If you want to change
the association of .pl to perl.exe, you need to change the application mapping. In the mapping, you must add two
percent (%) characters to the end of the pathname for perl.exe, as shown in this example: c:\perl\bin\perl.exe %s %s”

7.4. I’m having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being able to talk to the database.
Your modules may be outdated or inaccurate. Try:

1. Hitting http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl
2. Download ActivePerl
3. Go to your prompt
4. Type ’ppm’
5. PPM> install DBI DBD-mysql GD
I reckon TimeDate and Data::Dumper come with the activeperl. You can check the ActiveState site for packages
for installation through PPM. http://www.activestate.com/Packages/.

8. Bugzilla Usage

8.1. How do I change my user name (email address) in Bugzilla?

New in 2.16 - go to the Account section of the Preferences. You will be emailed at both addresses for confirma-
tion.

8.2. The query page is very confusing. Isn’t there a simpler way to query?
The interface was simplified by a UI designer for 2.16. Further suggestions for improvement are welcome, but
we won’t sacrifice power for simplicity.

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As of 2.18, there is also a ’simpler’ search available. At the top of the search page are two links; “Advanced
Search” will take you to the familiar full-power/full-complexity search page. The “Find a Specific Bug” link
will take you to a much-simplified page where you can pick a product and status (open,closed, or both), then
enter words that appear in the bug you want to find. This search will scour the ’Summary’ and ’Comment’ fields,
and return a list of bugs sorted so that the bugs with the most hits/matches are nearer to the top.

Note: Matches in the Summary will ’trump’ matches in comments, and bugs with summary-matches will be
placed higher in the buglist -- even if a lower-ranked bug has more matches in the comments section.

Bugzilla uses a cookie to remember which version of the page you visited last, and brings that page up when
you next do a search. The default page for new users (or after an upgrade) is the ’simple’ search.

8.3. I’m confused by the behavior of the “Accept” button in the Show Bug form. Why doesn’t it assign the bug
to me when I accept it?
The current behavior is acceptable to bugzilla.mozilla.org and most users. If you want to change this behavior,
though, you have your choice of patches:

Bug 35195 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35195) seeks to add an “...and accept the bug” checkbox to the UI. It h
Bug 37613 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37613) also provides two patches (against Bugzilla 2.12): one to add a
These patches are all somewhat dated now, and cannot be applied directly, but they are simple enough to provide
a guide on how Bugzilla can be customized and updated to suit your needs.

8.4. I can’t upload anything into the database via the “Create Attachment” link. What am I doing wrong?
The most likely cause is a very old browser or a browser that is incompatible with file upload via POST.
Download the latest version of your favourite browser to handle uploads correctly.

8.5. How do I change a keyword in Bugzilla, once some bugs are using it?
In the Bugzilla administrator UI, edit the keyword and it will let you replace the old keyword name with a new
one. This will cause a problem with the keyword cache; run sanitycheck.cgi to fix it.

8.6. Why can’t I close bugs from the “Change Several Bugs at Once” page?
Simple answer; you can.
The logic behind the page checks every bug in the list to determine legal state changes, and then only shows
you controls to do things that could apply to every bug on the list. The reason for this is that if you try to do
something illegal to a bug, the whole process will grind to a halt, and all changes after the failed one will also
fail. Since that isn’t a good outcome, the page doesn’t even present you with the option.
In practical terms, that means that in order to mark multiple bugs as CLOSED, then every bug on the page has
to be either RESOLVED or VERIFIED already; if this is not the case, then the option to close the bugs will not
appear on the page.
The rationale is that if you pick one of the bugs that’s not VERIFIED and try to CLOSE it, the bug change will
fail miserably (thus killing any changes in the list after it while doing the bulk change) so it doesn’t even give
you the choice.

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9. Bugzilla Hacking

9.1. What kind of style should I use for templatization?

Gerv and Myk suggest a 2-space indent, with embedded code sections on their own line, in line with outer tags.
Like this:

<fred>
[% IF foo %]
<bar>
[% FOREACH x = barney %]
<tr>
<td>
[% x %]
</td>
<tr>
[% END %]
[% END %]
</fred>

Myk also recommends you turn on PRE_CHOMP in the template initialization to prevent bloating of HTML
with unnecessary whitespace.
Please note that many have differing opinions on this subject, and the existing templates in Bugzilla espouse
both this and a 4-space style. Either is acceptable; the above is preferred.

9.2. What bugs are in Bugzilla right now?

Try this link (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&prod
to view current bugs or requests for enhancement for Bugzilla.
You can view bugs marked for 2.22.3 release here (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Bugzilla&target_milestone=Bug
nextver;). This list includes bugs for the 2.22.3 release that have already been fixed and checked into CVS.
Please consult the Bugzilla Project Page (http://www.bugzilla.org/) for details on how to check current sources
out of CVS so you can have these bug fixes early!

9.3. How can I change the default priority to a null value? For instance, have the default priority be “---” instead
of “P2”?
This is well-documented in bug 49862 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49862). Ultimately, it’s as
easy as adding the “---” priority field to your localconfig file in the appropriate area, re-running checksetup.pl,
and then changing the default priority in your browser using editparams.cgi.

9.4. What’s the best way to submit patches? What guidelines should I follow?

1. Enter a bug into bugzilla.mozilla.org for the “Bugzilla (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Bugzilla)”

product.
2. Upload your patch as a unified diff (having used “diff -u” against the current sources checked out of CVS),
or new source file by clicking “Create a new attachment” link on the bug page you’ve just created, and

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include any descriptions of database changes you may make, into the bug ID you submitted in step #1. Be
sure and click the “Patch” checkbox to indicate the text you are sending is a patch!
3. Announce your patch and the associated URL (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XXXXXX) for
discussion in the newsgroup (mozilla.support.bugzilla). You’ll get a really good, fairly immediate reaction
to the implications of your patch, which will also give us an idea how well-received the change would be.
4. If it passes muster with minimal modification, the person to whom the bug is assigned in Bugzilla is re-
sponsible for seeing the patch is checked into CVS.
5. Bask in the glory of the fact that you helped write the most successful open-source bug-tracking software
on the planet :)

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Appendix B. Troubleshooting
This section gives solutions to common Bugzilla installation problems. If none of the section headings seems to match
your problem, read the general advice.

B.1. General Advice

If you can’t get checksetup.pl to run to completion, it normally explains what’s wrong and how to fix
it. If you can’t work it out, or if it’s being uncommunicative, post the errors in the mozilla.support.bugzilla
(news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.support.bugzilla) newsgroup.
If you have made it all the way through Section 2.1 (Installation) and Section 2.2 (Configuration) but accessing the
Bugzilla URL doesn’t work, the first thing to do is to check your webserver error log. For Apache, this is often located
at /etc/logs/httpd/error_log. The error messages you see may be self-explanatory enough to enable you to
diagnose and fix the problem. If not, see below for some commonly-encountered errors. If that doesn’t help, post the
errors to the newsgroup.
Bugzilla can also log all user-based errors (and many code-based errors) that occur, without polluting the web server
error log. To enable Bugzilla error logging, create a file that Bugzilla can write to, named errorlog, in the Bugzilla
data directory. Errors will be logged as they occur, and will include the type of the error, the IP address and username
(if available) of the user who triggered the error, and the values of all environment variables; if a form was being
submitted, the data in the form will also be included. To disable error logging, delete or rename the errorlog file.

B.2. The Apache webserver is not serving Bugzilla pages

After you have run checksetup.pl twice, run testserver.pl http://yoursite.yourdomain/yoururl to confirm that your
webserver is configured properly for Bugzilla.

bash$ ./testserver.pl http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip

TEST-OK Webserver is running under group id in $webservergroup.
TEST-OK Got ant picture.
TEST-OK Webserver is executing CGIs.
TEST-OK Webserver is preventing fetch of http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/localconfig.

B.3. I installed a Perl module, but checksetup.pl claims

it’s not installed!
This could be caused by one of two things:

1. You have two versions of Perl on your machine. You are installing modules into one, and Bugzilla is us-
ing the other. Rerun the CPAN commands (or manual compile) using the full path to Perl from the top of
checksetup.pl. This will make sure you are installing the modules in the right place.

95
 Appendix B. Troubleshooting

2. The permissions on your library directories are set incorrectly. They must, at the very least, be readable by the
webserver user or group. It is recommended that they be world readable.

B.4. DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed

The following error message may appear due to a bug in DBD::mysql (over which the Bugzilla team have no control):

DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed: Cannot determine NUM_OF_FIELDS at D:/Perl/site/lib/DBD/mysql.pm line

SV = NULL(0x0) at 0x20fc444
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY)

To fix this, go to <path-to-perl>/lib/DBD/sponge.pm in your Perl installation and replace

my $numFields;
if ($attribs->{’NUM_OF_FIELDS’}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{’NUM_OF_FIELDS’};
} elsif ($attribs->{’NAME’}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAME}};

with

my $numFields;
if ($attribs->{’NUM_OF_FIELDS’}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{’NUM_OF_FIELDS’};
} elsif ($attribs->{’NAMES’}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAMES}};

(note the S added to NAME.)

B.5. cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue)

If you are installing Bugzilla on SuSE Linux, or some other distributions with “paranoid” security options, it is
possible that the checksetup.pl script may fail with the error:

cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue): Permission denied

This is because your /var/spool/mqueue directory has a mode of drwx------. Type chmod 755
/var/spool/mqueue as root to fix this problem. This will allow any process running on your machine the ability to
read the /var/spool/mqueue directory.

96
 Appendix B. Troubleshooting

B.6. Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro

O_NOINHERIT
This is caused by a bug in the version of File::Temp that is distributed with perl 5.6.0. Many minor variations of this
error have been reported:

Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_NOINHERIT, used

at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 208.

Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_EXLOCK, used

at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 210.

Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_TEMPORARY, used

at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 233.

Numerous people have reported that upgrading to version 5.6.1 or higher solved the problem for them. A less involved
fix is to apply the following patch, which is also available as a patch file (../xml/filetemp.patch).

--- File/Temp.pm.orig Thu Feb 6 16:26:00 2003

+++ File/Temp.pm Thu Feb 6 16:26:23 2003
@@ -205,6 +205,7 @@
# eg CGI::Carp
local $SIG{__DIE__} = sub {};
local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub {};
+ local *CORE::GLOBAL::die = sub {};
$bit = &$func();
1;
};
@@ -226,6 +227,7 @@
# eg CGI::Carp
local $SIG{__DIE__} = sub {};
local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub {};
+ local *CORE::GLOBAL::die = sub {};
$bit = &$func();
1;
};

B.7. Everybody is constantly being forced to relogin

The most-likely cause is that the “cookiepath” parameter is not set correctly in the Bugzilla configuration. You can
change this (if you’re a Bugzilla administrator) from the editparams.cgi page via the web.
The value of the cookiepath parameter should be the actual directory containing your Bugzilla installation, as seen
by the end-user’s web browser. Leading and trailing slashes are mandatory. You can also set the cookiepath to any
directory which is a parent of the Bugzilla directory (such as ’/’, the root directory). But you can’t put something
that isn’t at least a partial match or it won’t work. What you’re actually doing is restricting the end-user’s browser to
sending the cookies back only to that directory.
How do you know if you want your specific Bugzilla directory or the whole site?

97
 Appendix B. Troubleshooting

If you have only one Bugzilla running on the server, and you don’t mind having other applications on the same server
with it being able to see the cookies (you might be doing this on purpose if you have other things on your site that
share authentication with Bugzilla), then you’ll want to have the cookiepath set to "/", or to a sufficiently-high enough
directory that all of the involved apps can see the cookies.

Example B-1. Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs for sharing login cookies

urlbase is http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
cookiepath is /

urlbase is http://tools.mysite.tld/bugzilla/
but you have http://tools.mysite.tld/someotherapp/ which shares
authentication with your Bugzilla
cookiepath is /

On the other hand, if you have more than one Bugzilla running on the server (some people do - we do on landfill) then
you need to have the cookiepath restricted enough so that the different Bugzillas don’t confuse their cookies with one
another.

Example B-2. Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs to restrict the login cookie

urlbase is http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/
cookiepath is /bugzilla-tip/

urlbase is http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-2.16-branch/
cookiepath is /bugzilla-2.16-branch/

If you had cookiepath set to “/” at any point in the past and need to set it to something more restrictive (i.e. “/bugzilla/”),
you can safely do this without requiring users to delete their Bugzilla-related cookies in their browser (this is true
starting with Bugzilla 2.18 and Bugzilla 2.16.5).

B.8. Some users are constantly being forced to relogin

First, make sure cookies are enabled in the user’s browser.
If that doesn’t fix the problem, it may be that the user’s ISP implements a rotating proxy server. This causes the user’s
effective IP address (the address which the Bugzilla server perceives him coming from) to change periodically. Since
Bugzilla cookies are tied to a specific IP address, each time the effective address changes, the user will have to log in
again.
If you are using 2.18 (or later), there is a parameter called “loginnetmask”, which you can use to set the number of
bits of the user’s IP address to require to be matched when authenticating the cookies. If you set this to something less
than 32, then the user will be given a checkbox for “Restrict this login to my IP address” on the login screen, which
defaults to checked. If they leave the box checked, Bugzilla will behave the same as it did before, requiring an exact
match on their IP address to remain logged in. If they uncheck the box, then only the left side of their IP address (up
to the number of bits you specified in the parameter) has to match to remain logged in.

98
 Appendix B. Troubleshooting

B.9. index.cgi doesn’t show up unless specified in the

URL
You probably need to set up your web server in such a way that it will serve the index.cgi page as an index page.
If you are using Apache, you can do this by adding index.cgi to the end of the DirectoryIndex line as mentioned
in Section 2.2.4.1.

B.10. checksetup.pl reports "Client does not support

authentication protocol requested by server..."
This error is occurring because you are using the new password encryption that comes with MySQL 4.1, while your
DBD::mysql module was compiled against an older version of MySQL. If you recompile DBD::mysql against the
current MySQL libraries (or just obtain a newer version of this module) then the error may go away.
If that does not fix the problem, or if you cannot recompile the existing module (e.g. you’re running Windows) and/or
don’t want to replace it (e.g. you want to keep using a packaged version), then a workaround is available from the
MySQL docs: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Old_client.html

99
Appendix C. Contrib
There are a number of unofficial Bugzilla add-ons in the $BUGZILLA_ROOT/contrib/ directory. This section docu-
ments them.

C.1. Command-line Search Interface

There are a suite of Unix utilities for searching Bugzilla from the command line. They live in the contrib/cmdline
directory. There are three files - query.conf, buglist and bugs.

Warning
These files pre-date the templatisation work done as part of the 2.16 release, and have not been updated.

query.conf contains the mapping from options to field names and comparison types. Quoted option names are
“grepped” for, so it should be easy to edit this file. Comments (#) have no effect; you must make sure these lines do
not contain any quoted “option”.
buglist is a shell script that submits a Bugzilla query and writes the resulting HTML page to stdout. It supports both
short options, (such as “-Afoo” or “-Rbar”) and long options (such as “--assignedto=foo” or “--reporter=bar”). If the
first character of an option is not “-”, it is treated as if it were prefixed with “--default=”.
The column list is taken from the COLUMNLIST environment variable. This is equivalent to the “Change Columns”
option that is available when you list bugs in buglist.cgi. If you have already used Bugzilla, grep for COLUMNLIST
in your cookies file to see your current COLUMNLIST setting.
bugs is a simple shell script which calls buglist and extracts the bug numbers from the output. Adding the prefix
“http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=” turns the bug list into a working link if any bugs are found. Counting
bugs is easy. Pipe the results through sed -e ’s/,/ /g’ | wc | awk ’{printf $2 "\n"}’
Akkana Peck says she has good results piping buglist output through w3m -T text/html -dump

C.2. Command-line ’Send Unsent Bug-mail’ tool

Within the contrib directory exists a utility with the descriptive (if compact) name of sendunsentbugmail.pl.
The purpose of this script is, simply, to send out any bug-related mail that should have been sent by now, but for one
reason or another has not.
To accomplish this task, sendunsentbugmail.pl uses the same mechanism as the sanitycheck.cgi script; it
scans through the entire database looking for bugs with changes that were made more than 30 minutes ago, but where
there is no record of anyone related to that bug having been sent mail. Having compiled a list, it then uses the standard
rules to determine who gets mail, and sends it out.
As the script runs, it indicates the bug for which it is currently sending mail; when it has finished, it gives a numerical
count of how many mails were sent and how many people were excluded. (Individual user names are not recorded or
displayed.) If the script produces no output, that means no unsent mail was detected.
Usage: move the sendunsentbugmail.pl script up into the main directory, ensure it has execute permission, and run it
from the command line (or from a cron job) with no parameters.

100
Appendix D. Manual Installation of Perl
Modules

D.1. Instructions
If you need to install Perl modules manually, here’s how it’s done. Download the module using the link given in the
next section, and then apply this magic incantation, as root:

bash# tar -xzvf <module>.tar.gz

bash# cd <module>
bash# perl Makefile.PL
bash# make
bash# make test
bash# make install

Note: In order to compile source code under Windows you will need to obtain a ’make’ utility. The nmake utility
provided with Microsoft Visual C++ may be used. As an alternative, there is a utility called dmake available from
CPAN which is written entirely in Perl. The majority of the links given below, however, are to pre-compiled versions
of the modules, which can be installed on Windows simply by issuing the following command once you have
downloaded the PPD file (which may be packaged within a ZIP file):

> ppm install <filename.ppd>

D.2. Download Locations

Note: Running Bugzilla on Windows requires the use of ActiveState Perl 5.8.1 or higher. Some modules already
exist in the core distribution of ActiveState Perl so no PPM link is given. (This is noted where it occurs.)

AppConfig:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/src/ABW/AppConfig-1.56/lib/AppConfig.pm

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/AppConfig.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/~abw/AppConfig-1.56/lib/AppConfig.pm

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 Appendix D. Manual Installation of Perl Modules

CGI:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI.pm/

PPM Download Link: Part of core distribution.
Documentation: http://perldoc.perl.org/CGI.html

Data-Dumper:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Data-Dumper/

PPM Download Page: Part of core distribution.
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Data-Dumper/Dumper.pm

Date::Format (part of TimeDate):

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/TimeDate/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/TimeDate.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/TimeDate/lib/Date/Format.pm

DBI:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBI/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/DBI.ppd
Documentation: http://dbi.perl.org/docs/

DBD::mysql:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-mysql/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/DBD-mysql.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-mysql/lib/DBD/mysql.pm

DBD::Pg:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/

PPM Download Link: http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/x86/DBD-Pg.tar.gz
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBD-Pg/Pg.pm

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 Appendix D. Manual Installation of Perl Modules

File::Spec:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-Spec/

PPM Download Page: Part of core distribution.
Documentation: http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Spec.html

File::Temp:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-Temp/

PPM Download Page: Part of core distribution.
Documentation: http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/lib/File/Temp.html

Template-Toolkit:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-Toolkit/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/Template-Toolkit.ppd
Documentation: http://www.template-toolkit.org/docs.html

Text::Wrap:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Tabs+Wrap/

PPM Download Link: Part of core distribution.
Documentation: http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/lib/Text/Wrap.html

GD:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GD/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/GD.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GD/GD.pm

Template::Plugin::GD:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-GD/

PPM Download Link: (Just install Template-Toolkit using the instructions below)
Documentation: http://www.template-toolkit.org/docs/aqua/Modules/index.html

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 Appendix D. Manual Installation of Perl Modules

MIME::Base64:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MIME-Base64/

PPM Download Link: http://ppm.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/8xx-builds-only/Windows/MIME-Base64-2.20.zip
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MIME-Base64/Base64.pm

MIME::Parser (part of MIME-tools):

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MIME-tools/

PPM Download Link: http://ppm.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/8xx-builds-only/Windows/MIME-tools-5.411a.zip
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MIME-tools/lib/MIME/Parser.pm

D.3. Optional Modules

Chart::Base:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Chart/

PPM Download Page: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/Chart.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Chart/Chart.pod

GD::Graph:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GDGraph/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/GDGraph.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GDGraph/Graph.pm

GD::Text::Align (part of GD::Text::Util):

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GDTextUtil/

PPM Download Page: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/GDTextUtil.ppd
Documentation: http://search.cpan.org/dist/GDTextUtil/Text/Align.pm

XML::Twig:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Twig/

PPM Download Link: http://ppm.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/8xx-builds-only/Windows/XML-Twig-3.22.zip

104
 Appendix D. Manual Installation of Perl Modules

Documentation: http://standards.ieee.org/resources/spasystem/twig/twig_stable.html

PatchReader:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/author/JKEISER/PatchReader/

PPM Download Link: http://landfill.bugzilla.org/ppm/PatchReader.ppd
Documentation: http://www.johnkeiser.com/mozilla/Patch_Viewer.html

Image::Magick:

CPAN Download Page: http://search.cpan.org/dist/PerlMagick/

PPM Download Link: Included in Windows binary package.
Documentation: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/resources.php

105
Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.1, March 2000

Copyright (C) 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is
permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

0. Preamble
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom:
to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially
or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their
work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free
in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free
software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free
documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But
this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter
or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is
instruction or reference.

1. Applicability and Definition

This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be
distributed under the terms of this License. The "Document", below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member
of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you".
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied
verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the
relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document’s overall subject (or to related matters)
and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document is in part a
textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter
of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or
political position regarding them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sec-
tions, in the notice that says that the Document is released under this License.
The "Cover Texts" are certain short passages of text that are listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the
notice that says that the Document is released under this License.
A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy, represented in a format whose specification
is available to the general public, whose contents can be viewed and edited directly and straightforwardly with generic
text editors or (for images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available draw-

106
 Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License

ing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable
for input to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose markup has been designed to
thwart or discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. A copy that is not "Transparent" is called
"Opaque".
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, La-
TeX input format, SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple HTML designed
for human modification. Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited
only by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not generally
available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output purposes only.
The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold,
legibly, the material this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in formats which do not have any
title page as such, "Title Page" means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work’s title, preceding the
beginning of the body of the text.

2. Verbatim Copying
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided that
this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to the Document are reproduced
in all copies, and that you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use technical
measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may
accept compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also follow
the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and you may publicly display copies.

3. Copying in Quantity
If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than 100, and the Document’s license notice requires
Cover Texts, you must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover
Texts on the front cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and legibly identify
you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover must present the full title with all words of the title equally
prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes limited to the
covers, as long as they preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim
copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as
fit reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering more than 100, you must either include a
machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy a publicly-
accessible computer-network location containing a complete Transparent copy of the Document, free of added mate-
rial, which the general network-using public has access to download anonymously at no charge using public-standard
network protocols. If you use the latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin distribution
of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location
until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or retailers)
of that edition to the public.

107
 Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License

It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the Document well before redistributing any large
number of copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the Document.

4. Modifications
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above,
provided that you release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified Version filling the role
of the Document, thus licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy of
it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:

A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct from that of the Document, and from those of
previous versions (which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section of the Document). You may
use the same title as a previous version if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications
in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal
authors, if it has less than five).
C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified Version, as the publisher.
D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications adjacent to the other copyright notices.
F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice giving the public permission to use the Modified
Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document’s
license notice.
H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors,
and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section entitled "History" in the
Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page,
then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence.
J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the
Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on.
These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at
least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications", preserve the section’s title, and preserve in the
section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein.
L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section numbers or
the equivalent are not considered part of the section titles.
M. Delete any section entitled "Endorsements". Such a section may not be included in the Modified Version.
N. Do not retitle any existing section as "Endorsements" or to conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and
contain no material copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all of these sections as

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 Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License

invariant. To do this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version’s license notice. These
titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
You may add a section entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Ver-
sion by various parties--for example, statements of peer review or that the text has been approved by an organization
as the authoritative definition of a standard.
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover
Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of Front-Cover Text and one
of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already
includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity you
are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit permission from the
previous publisher that added the old one.
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License give permission to use their names for publicity
for or to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.

5. Combining Documents
You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section
4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the
original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice.
The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be
replaced with a single copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but different contents, make
the title of each such section unique by adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original author or
publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number. Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list
of Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
In the combination, you must combine any sections entitled "History" in the various original documents, forming
one section entitled "History"; likewise combine any sections entitled "Acknowledgements", and any sections entitled
"Dedications". You must delete all sections entitled "Endorsements."

6. Collections of Documents
You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other documents released under this License, and replace
the individual copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy that is included in the collection,
provided that you follow the rules of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all other respects.
You may extract a single document from such a collection, and distribute it individually under this License, provided
you insert a copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this License in all other respects regarding
verbatim copying of that document.

7. Aggregation with Independent Works

A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and independent documents or works, in or on
a volume of a storage or distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version of the Document,

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 Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License

provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the compilation. Such a compilation is called an "aggregate", and
this License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled with the Document, on account of their
being thus compiled, if they are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of the Document, then if the Document is less
than one quarter of the entire aggregate, the Document’s Cover Texts may be placed on covers that surround only the
Document within the aggregate. Otherwise they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.

8. Translation
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may distribute translations of the Document under the terms
of section 4. Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special permission from their copyright holders,
but you may include translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the original versions of these Invariant
Sections. You may include a translation of this License provided that you also include the original English version of
this License. In case of a disagreement between the translation and the original English version of this License, the
original English version will prevail.

9. Termination
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document except as expressly provided for under this License.
Any other attempt to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and will automatically terminate
your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will
not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.

10. Future Revisions of this License

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time
to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new
problems or concerns. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.
Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular
numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and
conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version
ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.

How to use this License for your documents

To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of the License in the document and put the
following copyright and license notices just after the title page:

Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms
of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with

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 Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License

the Invariant Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts
being LIST. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

If you have no Invariant Sections, write "with no Invariant Sections" instead of saying which ones are invariant. If
you have no Front-Cover Texts, write "no Front-Cover Texts" instead of "Front-Cover Texts being LIST"; likewise for
Back-Cover Texts.
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we recommend releasing these examples in parallel
under your choice of free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to permit their use in free
software.

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Glossary

0-9, high ascii

.htaccess

Apache web server, and other NCSA-compliant web servers, observe the convention of using files in directories
called .htaccess to restrict access to certain files. In Bugzilla, they are used to keep secret files which would
otherwise compromise your installation - e.g. the localconfig file contains the password to your database.
curious.

A
Apache

In this context, Apache is the web server most commonly used for serving up Bugzilla pages. Contrary to popular
belief, the apache web server has nothing to do with the ancient and noble Native American tribe, but instead
derived its name from the fact that it was “a patchy” version of the original NCSA world-wide-web server.

Useful Directives when configuring Bugzilla

AddHandler (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#addhandler)

Tell Apache that it’s OK to run CGI scripts.

AllowOverride (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#allowoverride)
Options (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#options)

These directives are used to tell Apache many things about the directory they apply to. For Bugzilla’s
purposes, we need them to allow script execution and .htaccess overrides.

DirectoryIndex (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/mod_dir.html#directoryindex)

Used to tell Apache what files are indexes. If you can not add index.cgi to the list of valid files, you’ll need
to set $index_html to 1 in localconfig so ./checksetup.pl will create an index.html that redirects to
index.cgi.

ScriptInterpreterSource (http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#scriptinterpretersource)

Used when running Apache on windows so the shebang line doesn’t have to be changed in every Bugzilla
script.
For more information about how to configure Apache for Bugzilla, see Section 2.2.4.1.

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B
Bug

A “bug” in Bugzilla refers to an issue entered into the database which has an associated number, assignments,
comments, etc. Some also refer to a “tickets” or “issues”; in the context of Bugzilla, they are synonymous.

Bug Number

Each Bugzilla bug is assigned a number that uniquely identifies that bug. The bug associated with a bug number
can be pulled up via a query, or easily from the very front page by typing the number in the "Find" box.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is the world-leading free software bug tracking system.

C
Common Gateway Interface

CGI is an acronym for Common Gateway Interface. This is a standard for interfacing an external application with
a web server. Bugzilla is an example of a CGI application.

Component

A Component is a subsection of a Product. It should be a narrow category, tailored to your organization. All
Products must contain at least one Component (and, as a matter of fact, creating a Product with no Components
will create an error in Bugzilla).

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

CPAN stands for the “Comprehensive Perl Archive Network”. CPAN maintains a large number of extremely
useful Perl modules - encapsulated chunks of code for performing a particular task.

contrib

The contrib directory is a location to put scripts that have been contributed to Bugzilla but are not a part of the
official distribution. These scripts are written by third parties and may be in languages other than perl. For those

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 that are in perl, there may be additional modules or other requirements than those of the official distribution.

Note: Scripts in the contrib directory are not officially supported by the Bugzilla team and may break in
between versions.

D
daemon

A daemon is a computer program which runs in the background. In general, most daemons are started at boot
time via System V init scripts, or through RC scripts on BSD-based systems. mysqld, the MySQL server, and
apache, a web server, are generally run as daemons.

DOS Attack

A DOS, or Denial of Service attack, is when a user attempts to deny access to a web server by repeatedly
accessing a page or sending malformed requests to a webserver. This can be effectively prevented by using
mod_throttle as described in Section 4.3.2. A D-DOS, or Distributed Denial of Service attack, is when these
requests come from multiple sources at the same time. Unfortunately, these are much more difficult to defend
against.

G
Groups

The word “Groups” has a very special meaning to Bugzilla. Bugzilla’s main security mechanism comes by
placing users in groups, and assigning those groups certain privileges to view bugs in particular Products in the
Bugzilla database.

J
JavaScript

JavaScript is cool, we should talk about it.

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M
Message Transport Agent

A Message Transport Agent is used to control the flow of email on a system. The Mail::Mailer
(http://search.cpan.org/dist/MailTools/Mail/Mailer.pm) Perl module, which Bugzilla uses to send email, can
be configured to use many different underlying implementations for actually sending the mail using the
mail_delivery_method parameter. Implementations other than sendmail require that the sendmailnow
param be set to on.

MySQL

MySQL is currently the required RDBMS for Bugzilla. MySQL can be downloaded from http://www.mysql.com.
While you should familiarize yourself with all of the documentation, some high points are:

Backup (http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Backup.html)
Methods for backing up your Bugzilla database.

Option Files (http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Option_files.html)

Information about how to configure MySQL using my.cnf.

Privilege System (http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Privilege_system.html)

Much more detailed information about the suggestions in Section 4.2.

P
Perl Package Manager

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/PPM/

Product

A Product is a broad category of types of bugs, normally representing a single piece of software or entity. In
general, there are several Components to a Product. A Product may define a group (used for security) for all bugs
entered into its Components.

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Perl

First written by Larry Wall, Perl is a remarkable program language. It has the benefits of the flexibility of an
interpreted scripting language (such as shell script), combined with the speed and power of a compiled language,
such as C. Bugzilla is maintained in Perl.

Q
QA

“QA”, “Q/A”, and “Q.A.” are short for “Quality Assurance”. In most large software development organizations,
there is a team devoted to ensuring the product meets minimum standards before shipping. This team will also
generally want to track the progress of bugs over their life cycle, thus the need for the “QA Contact” field in a
bug.

R
Relational DataBase Management System

A relational database management system is a database system that stores information in tables that are related
to each other.

Regular Expression

A regular expression is an expression used for pattern matching. Documentation

(http://perldoc.com/perl5.6/pod/perlre.html#Regular-Expressions)

S
Service

In Windows NT environment, a boot-time background application is refered to as a service. These are generally
managed through the control panel while logged in as an account with “Administrator” level capabilities. For
more information, consult your Windows manual or the MSKB.

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SGML

SGML stands for “Standard Generalized Markup Language”. Created in the 1980’s to provide an extensible
means to maintain documentation based upon content instead of presentation, SGML has withstood the test of
time as a robust, powerful language. XML is the “baby brother” of SGML; any valid XML document it, by
definition, a valid SGML document. The document you are reading is written and maintained in SGML, and is
also valid XML if you modify the Document Type Definition.

T
Target Milestone

Target Milestones are Product goals. They are configurable on a per-Product basis. Most software development
houses have a concept of “milestones” where the people funding a project expect certain functionality on certain
dates. Bugzilla facilitates meeting these milestones by giving you the ability to declare by which milestone a bug
will be fixed, or an enhancement will be implemented.

Tool Command Language

TCL is an open source scripting language available for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix based systems. Bugzilla
1.0 was written in TCL but never released. The first release of Bugzilla was 2.0, which was when it was ported
to perl.

Z
Zarro Boogs Found

This is just a goofy way of saying that there were no bugs found matching your query. When asked to explain
this message, Terry had the following to say:

I’ve been asked to explain this ... way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release
party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn’t
actually happened. (This is not unique to Netscape or to 4.0; the same thing has happened with every software project
I’ve ever seen.) Anyway, at the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro
Boogs". Just like the software, the T-shirt had no known bugs. Uh-huh.
So, when you query for a list of bugs, and it gets no results, you can think of this as a friendly reminder. Of *course*
there are bugs matching your query, they just aren’t in the bugsystem yet...
—Terry Weissman

117