Copyright 2009-11 Jutda and Ross Poulton. All Rights Reserved. See LICENSE for details.

django-helpdesk was formerly known as Jutda Helpdesk, named after the company who originally created it. As of January 2011 the name has been changed to reflect what it really is: a Django-powered ticket tracker with contributors reaching far beyond Jutda.

Complete documentation is available in the docs/ directory, or online at http://django-helpdesk.readthedocs.org/.

You can see a demo installation at http://demo.jutdahelpdesk.com

See the file 'LICENSE' for licensing terms. Note that django-helpdesk is distributed with 3rd party products which have their own licenses. See LICENSE.3RDPARTY for license terms for included packages.

1. Python 2.4+
2. Django (1.2 or newer)
3. South for database migrations (highly recommended, but not required). Download from http://south.aeracode.org/
4. An existing WORKING Django project with database etc. If you cannot log into the Admin, you won't get this product working.

NOTE REGARDING SQLITE AND SEARCHING: If you use sqlite as your database, the search function will not work as effectively as it will with other databases due to its inability to do case-insensitive searches. It's recommended that you use PostgreSQL or MySQL if possible. For more information, see this note in the Django documentation: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/databases/#sqlite-string-matching

When you try to do a keyword search using sqlite, a message will be displayed to alert you to this shortcoming. There is no way around it, sorry.

NOTE REGARDING MySQL: If you use MySQL, with most default configurations you will receive an error when creating the database tables as we populate a number of default templates in languages other than English.

You must create the database the holds the django-helpdesk tables using the UTF-8 collation; see the MySQL manual for more information: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/charset-database.html

If you do NOT do this step, and you only want to use English-language templates, you can continue however you will receive a warning when running the 'migrate' commands.

We highly recommend that you use South (available from http://south.aeracode.org/) to assist with management of database schema changes.

If you are upgrading from a previous version that did NOT use South for migrations (i.e. prior to April 2011) then you will need to 'fake' the first migration:

python manage.py migrate helpdesk 0001 --fake

If you are upgrading from a previous version of django-helpdesk that DID use South, simply download an up to date version of the code base (eg by using git pull) then migrate the database:

python manage.py migrate helpdesk --db-dry-run # DB untouched
python manage.py migrate helpdesk 

Lastly, restart your web server software (eg Apache) or FastCGI instance, to ensure the latest changes are in use.

You can continue to the 'Initial Configuration' area, if needed.

If you are running Django 1.2.x then you will need to install django-staticfiles (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-staticfiles/) and add the following to your existing settings.py and urls.py files.

settings.py:

MEDIA_ROOT = '/var/www/media/'
MEDIA_URL = '/media/'
STATIC_ROOT = '/var/www/static/'
STATIC_URL = '/static/'

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    # Other installed applications here, including 'helpdesk'
    'staticfiles',             
)

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    # Other context processors listed here
    'staticfiles.context_processors.static',
)

urls.py:

from staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns
urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()

Once those changes are made, run the following commands to take a copy of the static files:

$ cd /var/www
$ mkdir static
$ cd static
$ ln -sf /path/to/helpdesk/static/helpdesk/ helpdesk

pip install django-helpdesk

For further installation information see docs/install.html and docs/configuration.html

If you want to help translate django-helpdesk into languages other than English, we encourage you to make use of our Transifex project.

http://www.transifex.net/projects/p/django-helpdesk/resource/core/

Feel free to request access to contribute your translations.