django-helpdesk/README.rst

django-helpdesk - A Django powered ticket tracker for small businesses.
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    :target: https://travis-ci.org/django-helpdesk/django-helpdesk

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

django-helpdesk was formerly known as Jutda Helpdesk, named after the
company which 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://django-helpdesk-demo.herokuapp.com/,
or run a demo locally in just a couple steps!

Licensing
---------

django-helpdesk is licensed under terms of the BSD 3-clause license.
See the file 'LICENSE' for full 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.

Demo Quickstart
---------------

django-helpdesk includes a basic demo Django project so that you may easily
get started with testing or developing django-helpdesk. The demo project
resides in the demo/ top-level folder.

It's likely that you can start up a demo project server by running
only the command:

    sudo make rundemo

then pointing your web browser at localhost:8080.

For more information and options, please read the demo/README.rst file.

**NOTE REGARDING SQLITE AND SEARCHING:**
The demo project uses sqlite as its database. Sqlite does not allow
case-insensitive searches and so the search function may not work as
effectively as it would on other database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
that does support case-insensitive searches.
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.

Installation
------------

django-helpdesk requires either Python 2.7 or 3.4+, as well as Django 1.8+.
The recommended combination is Python 3.4+ with Django 1.10.

You can quickly install the latest stable version of django-helpdesk app via pip:

    pip install django-helpdesk

You may also check out the master branch on GitHub, and install manually:

    python setup.py install

Either way, you will need to add django-helpdesk to an existing Django project.

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

Upgrading from previous versions
--------------------------------

If you are upgrading from a previous version of django-helpdesk that used
migrations, get an up to date version of the code base (eg by using
`git pull` or `pip install --upgrade django-helpdesk`) 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.

Unfortunately we are unable to assist if you are upgrading from a
version of django-helpdesk prior to migrations (ie pre-2011).

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

Contributing
------------

We're happy to include any type of contribution! This can be back-end
python/django code development, front-end web development
(HTML/Javascript, especially jQuery), or even language translations.

For more information on contributing, please see the CONTRIBUTING.rst file.