One of the nuisances of the classic version of ((OTRS)) Community Edition is that when installing the system from source (rather than system software repositories, using e.g. yum or apt), the installation process is a bit tedious. It requires the user to go through a series of configuration tasks, choosing the right variant for their operating system. Why do that manually though when you have a machine that's perfectly capable of following strict instructions?

This lead to the idea of making an installation utility to automate most of this process and make it easier, faster, and less error-prone. Most importantly, we wanted to make the installer user-friendly, so even though it's a command-line application, we decided to use colorful, well-formatted output to clearly communicate what's happening during the installation and to present the user with straightforward, simple choices.

And, in the spirit of classic terminal-based software, we even added an ANSI-art splash screen:

At this point the installer is able to perform a full installation of ((OTRS)) Community Edition version 6.0.32 on CentOS 8, and Ubuntu Server support is in the works. Before the first release, we plan to add support for a few more configurations.

Watch the short video below to get a sneak peek at how the tool works and see the complete installation process on a plain CentOS 8 machine:

Our plans for further development of the installer include:

• Support for more distributions and configurations
• Support for different databases
• Support for external database servers
• Unattended installation mode

With the first release, we will also open source the tool so that the community can participate in its development.