Bugzilla Windows installation problems

Spent a good chunk of the day installing Bugzilla onto a Windows box -- was a bit of a pain in the ass -- but the real problem was getting to the end and seeing how crappy it looks. Perhaps that is unkind to say since many someone's have spent their time for free building it, but at some point along the way it might be nice to encourage someone with an ability to lay out pages and forms to get involved (that would not be me, btw).

The forms are ugly and incomplete. For example, to assign someone as the default assignee for a component, you have to type in the email address accurately. Why not a drop-down of the people in the database?

The display just seems like a wireframe of what the interface should be rather than a real app. Likely the work has been in the backend and setting it up to do many things but it would be nice if the interface was given just a bit of attention.

Again, perhaps I'm being snide because I'm tired, having spent so much time trying to get it to work and realizing that I don't really want to work with the interface or have clients work with it.

But, here's some notes and info on what was involved:

1) Basic directions are at: Windows Install

2) I was using IIS, those basic directions are at: IIS Confiuration

3) Problem 1: The direction say Perl 5.8 or higher. I got 5.10 by default but the various packages you're supposed to install wouldn't even show up when I managed to figure out how to add the repository they are in. Only by putting in the full path to a package I wanted to install ("http://....") and running from the command line (the "ppm" command) did it tell me that the package wouldn't work on my "platform." Another hour or so to figure out WHICH platform it was talking about, i.e. ActivePerl 5.10.

Uninstalled 5.10, reinstalled 5.8 and the installs pretty much occurred as described in the directions.

4) Problem 2: IIS configuration. IISPassword was installed on the server I was on and it was preventing access to the directory due to the .htaccess file. Moved .htaccess out of the way just to get it to work.

5) Problem 3: IIS configuration. IIS refused to see index.cgi and run it despite following the directions in the reference above. Was getting a 404 File Not Found error which made no sense.

After a bunch of head pounding and testing, I realized IIS was only serving up files with extensions it recognized and figured that must be configured somewhere else. Sure enough it is, you have to go into: "Web Service Extensions" in the IIS management console and fiddle with the allowed extensions (many of which are prohibited by default).

Turned on CGI there (Perl CGI didn't work for me) and the Bugzilla site at least came up.

As I said, the interface is ugly, somewhat non intuitive so I'm going to take a look for some other option.

In the meanwhile, hope the above helps!

Thanks brother. Had a lot of the same problems and this post was a big help

Thanks. Web Service Extensions was my issue as well

Man ! If I were to write a blog at the end of day it would be exactly the same that you have written. ditto.(including the perl 5.10 version conflict) Sad that I dint stumble upon your blog earlier. The Web Service Extension thing, it took me very long to figure out.

I am still banging my head to get the mail feature working on the damn thing. If you have any idea, what to tweak/ what configurations will make the mail work, please lemme know at karthik.uf08@gmail.com. Thanks !

Glad it was of some help -- unfortunately can't help you with the email thing as I dropped it after I saw how crappy it looked and moved onto something else. Hope you're able to get it handled!

well, thank you. If I get the mail thing to work, i;ll post it here. That will be of some help to others.

yep ! I've figured it out. Bugzilla is up and running now :)

I have downloaded sendmail - bugzilla installer at the following url : http://glob.com.au/sendmail/
and configured it.

I thought I was done finally. It took me several hours and help from my friend to figure out that the anti-virus(Macfee) installed on my PC is blocking the requests to send mail. After disabling that, I finally have bugzilla on Windows using IIS up and running :)

Agreed, spent about an hour trying to get this to work and found it's damn ugly. Anyone else have a solution they recommend?