The Bugzilla Guide - 3.0.5 Release
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# 3.1. Bugzilla Configuration

Bugzilla is configured by changing various parameters, accessed from the "Parameters" link in the page footer. The parameters are divided into several categories, accessed via the menu on the left. Following is a description of the different categories and important parameters within those categories.

## 3.1.1. Required Settings

The core required parameters for any Bugzilla installation are set here. These parameters must be set before a new Bugzilla installation can be used. Administrators should review this list before deploying a new Bugzilla installation.

maintainer

  Email address of the person responsible for maintaining this Bugzilla installation. The address need not be that of a valid Bugzilla account.

urlbase

  Defines the fully qualified domain name and web server path to this Bugzilla installation.

  For example, if the Bugzilla query page is `http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/query.cgi`, the "urlbase" should be set to `http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/`.

docs_urlbase

  Defines path to the Bugzilla documentation. This can be a fully qualified domain name, or a path relative to "urlbase".

  For example, if the "Bugzilla Configuration" page of the documentation is `http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/docs/html/parameters.html`, set the "docs_urlbase" to `http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/docs/html/`.

sslbase

  Defines the fully qualified domain name and web server path for HTTPS (SSL) connections to this Bugzilla installation.

  For example, if the Bugzilla main page is `https://www.foo.com/bugzilla/index.cgi`, the "sslbase" should be set to `https://www.foo.com/bugzilla/`.

ssl

  Determines when Bugzilla will force HTTPS (SSL) connections, using the URL defined in sslbase. Options include "always", "never", and "authenticated sessions".

cookiedomain

  Defines the domain for Bugzilla cookies. This is typically left blank. If there are multiple hostnames that point to the same webserver, which require the same cookie, then this parameter can be utilized. For example, If your website is at `https://www.foo.com/`, setting this to `.foo.com/` will also allow `bar.foo.com/` to access Bugzilla cookies.

cookiepath

  Defines a path, relative to the web server root, that Bugzilla cookies will be restricted to. For example, if the urlbase is set to `http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/`, the cookiepath should be set to `/bugzilla/`. Setting it to "/" will allow all sites served by this web server or virtual host to read Bugzilla cookies.

timezone

  Timezone of server. The timezone is displayed with timestamps. If this parameter is left blank, the timezone is not displayed.

utf8

  Determines whether to use UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding for all text in Bugzilla. New installations should set this to true to avoid character encoding problems. Existing databases should set this to true only after the data has been converted from existing legacy character encoding to UTF-8, using the `contrib/recode.pl` script.

  | If you turn this parameter from "off" to "on", you must re-run `checksetup.pl` immediately afterward.

shutdownhtml

  If there is any text in this field, this Bugzilla installation will be completely disabled and this text will appear instead of all Bugzilla pages for all users, including Admins. Used in the event of site maintenance or outage situations.

  | 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).

announcehtml

  Any text in this field will be displayed at the top of every HTML page in this Bugzilla installation. The text is not wrapped in any tags. For best results, wrap the text in a "<div>" tag. Any style attributes from the CSS can be applied. For example, to make the text green inside of a red box, add "id=message" to the "<div>" tag.

proxy_url

  If this Bugzilla installation is behind a proxy, enter the proxy information here to enable Bugzilla to access the Internet. Bugzilla requires Internet access to utilize the upgrade_notification parameter (below). If the proxy requires authentication, use the syntax: `http://user:pass@proxy_url/`.

upgrade_notification

  Enable or disable a notification on the homepage of this Bugzilla installation when a newer version of Bugzilla is available. This notification is only visible to administrators. Choose "disabled", to turn off the notification. Otherwise, choose which version of Bugzilla you want to be notified about: "development_snapshot" is the latest release on the trunk; "latest_stable_release" is the most recent release available on the most recent stable branch; "stable_branch_release" the most recent release on the branch this installation is based on.

## 3.1.2. Administrative Policies

This page contains parameters for basic administrative functions. Options include whether to allow the deletion of bugs and users, whether to allow users to change their email address, and whether to allow user watching (one user receiving all notifications of a selected other user).

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.

## 3.1.3. User Authentication

This page contains the settings that control how this Bugzilla installation will do its authentication. Choose what authentication mechanism to use (the Bugzilla database, or an external source such as LDAP), and set basic behavioral parameters. For example, choose whether to require users to login to browse bugs, the management of authentication cookies, and the regular expression used to validate email addresses. Some parameters are highlighted below.

emailregexp

  Defines the regular expression used to validate email addresses used for login names. The default attempts to match fully qualified email addresses (i.e. 'user@example.com'). Some Bugzilla installations allow only local user names (i.e 'user' instead of 'user@example.com'). In that case, the emailsuffix parameter should be used to define the email domain.

emailsuffix

  This string is appended to login names when actually sending email to a user. For example, If emailregexp has been set to allow local usernames, then this parameter would contain the email domain for all users (i.e. '@example.com').

## 3.1.4. Attachments

This page allows for setting restrictions and other parameters regarding attachments to bugs. For example, control size limitations and whether to allow pointing to external files via a URI.

## 3.1.5. Bug Change Policies

Set policy on default behavior for bug change events. For example, choose whether to allow bug reporters to set the priority or target milestone. Also allows for configuration of what changes should require the user to make a comment, described below.

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.

  | 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!)

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.

## 3.1.6. Bug Fields

The parameters in this section determine the default settings of several Bugzilla fields for new bugs, and also control whether certain fields are used.

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.

## 3.1.7. Bug Moving

This page controls whether this Bugzilla installation allows certain users to move bugs to an external database. If bug moving is enabled, there are a number of parameters that control bug moving behaviors. For example, choose which users are allowed to move bugs, the location of the external database, and the default product and component that bugs moved from other bug databases to this Bugzilla installation are assigned to.

## 3.1.8. Dependency Graphs

This page has one parameter that sets the location of a Web Dot server, or of the Web Dot binary on the local system, that is used to generate dependency graphs. Web Dot is a CGI program that creates images from `.dot` graphic description files. If no Web Dot server or binary is specified, then dependency graphs will be disabled.

## 3.1.9. Group Security

Bugzilla allows for the creation of different groups, with the ability to restrict the visibility of bugs in a group to a set of specific users. Specific products can also be associated with groups, and users restricted to only see products in their groups. Several parameters are described in more detail below. Most of the configuration of groups and their relationship to products is done on the "Groups" and "Product" pages of the "Administration" area. The options on this page control global default behavior. For more information on Groups and Group Security, see Section 3.14

makeproductgroups

  Determines whether or not to automatically create groups when new products are created. If this is on, the groups will be used for querying bugs.

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.

usevisibilitygroups

  If selected, user visibility will be restricted to members of groups, as selected in the group configuration settings. Each user-defined group can be allowed to see members of selected other groups. For details on configuring groups (including the visibility restrictions) see Section 3.14.2.

querysharegroup

  The name of the group of users who are allowed to share saved searches with one another. For more information on using saved searches, see Saved Searches.

## 3.1.10. Localization

This section allows for setting which language is used by default for this Bugzilla installation. The "languages" parameter can also be used to determine which languages this Bugzilla installation supports. Note that any language listed here must have its corresponding language pack installed.

## 3.1.11. LDAP Authentication

LDAP authentication is a module for Bugzilla's plugin authentication architecture. This page contains all the parameters necessary to configure Bugzilla for use with LDAP authentication.

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 that require a 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. Bugzilla tries to bind to LDAP using those credentials and, if successful, tries to map this account to a Bugzilla account. If an LDAP mail attribute is defined, the value of this attribute is used, otherwise the "emailsuffix" parameter is appended to LDAP username to form a full email address. If an account for this address already exists in the Bugzilla installation, 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. For example, bugs are still assigned by email address and users are still queried by email address.

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 (default 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.

Parameters required to use LDAP Authentication:

user_verify_class

  If you want to list "LDAP" here, make sure to have set up the other parameters listed below. Unless you have other (working) authentication methods listed as well, you may otherwise not be able to log back in to Bugzilla once 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.

  For example: "ldap.company.com" or "ldap.company.com:3268"

  You can also specify a LDAP URI, so as to use other protocols, such as LDAPS or LDAPI. If port was not specified in the URI, the default is either 389 or 636 for 'LDAP' and 'LDAPS' schemes respectively.

  | In order to use SSL with LDAP, specify a URI with "ldaps://". This will force the use of SSL over port 636.

  For example, normal LDAP: "ldap://ldap.company.com", LDAP over SSL: "ldaps://ldap.company.com" or LDAP over a UNIX domain socket "ldapi://%2fvar%2flib%2fldap_sock".

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"

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"

## 3.1.12. Email

This page contains all of the parameters for configuring how Bugzilla deals with the email notifications it sends. See below for a summary of important options.

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. "Test" does not send mail, but instead saves it in `data/mailer.testfile` for later review. "None" disables email sending entirely.

mailfrom

  This is the email address that will appear in the "From" field of all emails sent by this Bugzilla installation. Some email servers require mail to be from a valid email address, therefore it is recommended to choose a valid email address here.

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).

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).

globalwatcher

  This allows you to define specific users who will receive notification each time a new bug in entered, or when an existing bug changes, according to the normal groupset permissions. It may be useful for sending notifications to a mailing-list, for instance.

## 3.1.13. Patch Viewer

This page contains configuration parameters for the CVS server, Bonsai server and LXR server that Bugzilla will use to enable the features of the Patch Viewer. Bonsai is a tool that enables queries to a CVS tree. LXR is a tool that can cross reference and index source code.

## 3.1.14. Query Defaults

This page controls the default behavior of Bugzilla in regards to several aspects of querying bugs. Options include what the default query options are, what the "My Bugs" page returns, whether users can freely add bugs to the quip list, and how many duplicate bugs are needed to add a bug to the "most frequently reported" list.

## 3.1.15. Shadow Database

This page controls whether a shadow database is used, and all the parameters associated with the shadow database. Bugzilla uses the MyISAM table type in MySQL, which supports only table-level write locking. With MyISAM, any time someone is making a change to a bug, the entire table is locked until the write operation is complete. Locking for write also blocks reads until the write is complete.

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.

| The shadow database is not automatically updated. Replication must be set up to keep the shadow database in sync with the main database.

## 3.1.16. User Matching

The settings on this page control how users are selected and queried when adding a user to a bug. For example, users need to be selected when choosing who the bug is assigned to, adding to the CC list or selecting a QA contact. With the "usemenuforusers" parameter, it is possible to configure Bugzilla to display a list of users in the fields instead of an empty text field. This should only be used in Bugzilla installations with a small number of users. If users are selected via a text box, this page also contains parameters for how user names can be queried and matched when entered.

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