Mantis Bug Tracker is a

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

bug tracking system. The most common use of MantisBT is to track software defects. However, MantisBT is often configured by users to serve as a more generic

issue tracking system An issue tracking system (also ITS, trouble ticket system, support ticket, request management or incident ticket system) is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues. Issue tracking systems are generally used in coll ...

and project management tool. The name Mantis and the

logo A logo (abbreviation of logotype; ) is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public identification and recognition. It may be of an abstract or figurative design or include the text of the name it represents as in a wordm ...

of the project refer to the

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs ...

family

Mantidae Mantidae is one of the largest families in the order of praying mantises, based on the type species ''Mantis religiosa''; however, most genera are tropical or subtropical. Historically, this was the only family in the order, and many references s ...

, known for the tracking of and feeding on other insects,

colloquially Colloquialism (), also called colloquial language, everyday language or general parlance, is the linguistic style used for casual (informal) communication. It is the most common functional style of speech, the idiom normally employed in conversa ...

referred to as "bugs". The name of the project is typically abbreviated to either MantisBT or just Mantis.

History

Kenzaburo Ito started development of the Mantis Bug Tracking project in 2000. In 2002, Kenzaburo was joined by Jeroen Latour, Victor Boctor and Julian Fitzell to be the administrators and it became a team project. Version 1.0.0 was released in February 2006. Version 1.1.0 was released in December 2007. In November 2008, after a long discussion, the project switched from using the

Subversion Subversion () refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system in place are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to transform the established social order and its structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and social norms. Sub ...

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

tool to Git, a distributed revision control tool. In February 2010, version 1.2.0 was released. In July 2012, the MantisBT organization on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

became the official repository for the Project's source code.

Features

Plug-ins

An event-driven

plug-in Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to: * Plug-in (computing) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. ** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features ** Photoshop plugin, a piece of softwar ...

system was introduced with the release o
version
1.2.0. This plug-in system allows extension of MantisBT through both officially maintained and third party plug-ins. As of November 2013, there are over 50 plug-ins available on the MantisBT-plugins organization on GitHub. Prior to version 1.2.0, a third party plug-in system created by Vincent Debout was available to users along with a variety of different plug-ins. This system was not officially supported by the MantisBT project and is incompatible with MantisBT 1.2.0 and later.

Notifications

MantisBT supports the sending of

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

notifications upon changes being made to issues in the system. Users have the ability to specify the type of e-mails they receive and set filters to define the minimum severity of issues to receive notifications about. Users also have the ability to explicitly subscribe to issues that affect them.

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

feeds are available for users who wish to keep track of issues that have been resolved. Additionally, MantisBT has integration with

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

via a plugin, to allow a notification to be tweeted when an issue is resolved. Via MantisBT's event-driven

system, it is possible to extend the built in notification support to run advanced scripts that perform additional notification actions (such as sending

SMS Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...

messages or updating statuses in external project management systems).

Revision control system integration

Versions Version may refer to: Computing * Software version, a set of numbers that identify a unique evolution of a computer program * VERSION (CONFIG.SYS directive), a configuration directive in FreeDOS Music * Cover version * Dub version * Remix * ''Ve ...

of MantisBT prior to 1.2.0 allowed for limited

integration Integration may refer to: Biology * Multisensory integration * Path integration * Pre-integration complex, viral genetic material used to insert a viral genome into a host genome *DNA integration, by means of site-specific recombinase technolo ...

with the

CVS CVS may refer to: Organizations * CVS Health, a US pharmacy chain ** CVS Pharmacy ** CVS Caremark, a prescription benefit management subsidiary * Council for Voluntary Service, England * Cable Video Store, former US pay-per-view service * CVS F ...

system. With the introduction of

capabilities in MantisBT 1.2.0, revision control integration was redeveloped by John Reese in the SourceIntegration plugin. The initial release of the SourceIntegration plugin supported

, GitWeb,

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirrori ...

and WebSVN. Over time, two additional modules were added and as of November 2013, source integration is supported for the following revision control tools and

providers: * cgit, a web interface for Git repositories, written in C *

, an open-source software hosting facility that hosts Git repositories * Gitweb, a free and open source web interface for Git repositories * HgWeb, a cgi web front-end for

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalabilit ...

repositories *

(for Subversion integration only), an open-source software hosting facility that hosts various types of software repositories * WebSVN, a free and open source web interface for

repositories * RhodeCode, an OpenSource web interface to Mercurial, Git and Subversion repositories Upon committing changesets to a source code repository, post-commit hooks within Git or Subversion can be configured to automatically notify MantisBT that changes have been made to the repository. GitHub is also capable of remotely notifying a MantisBT installation of changes to a source code repository. Another technique used for integrating MantisBT with web-based source code hosting providers is the use of a

job scheduler A job scheduler is a computer application for controlling unattended background program execution of jobs. This is commonly called batch scheduling, as execution of non-interactive jobs is often called batch processing, though traditional ''job' ...

such as cron to manually check for changes to a repository every few minutes, reporting any changes back to MantisBT. SourceIntegration allows for issues within MantisBT to be automatically resolved when a changeset message contains special strings such as "Fixes #12345", which are configurable using

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

s. This also allows for relationships to be automatically created between changesets and corresponding issues recorded in MantisBT. Multiple issue

IDs IDS may refer to: Computing * IBM Informix Dynamic Server, a relational database management system * Ideographic Description Sequence, describing a Unihan character as a combination of other characters * Integrated Data Store, one of the first da ...

can be specified in a single changeset message, although this is commonly discouraged as it indicates the changeset doesn't have a single, clear and logical purpose.

Minor features

In addition to the features mentioned above, MantisBT also has support for: *

Full text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original tex ...

Audit trail An audit trail (also called audit log) is a security-relevant chronological record, set of records, and/or destination and source of records that provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities that have affected at any time a specific ...

s of changes made to issues *

Revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

of text fields and notes * Roadmaps *

Changelog A changelog is a log or record of all notable changes made to a project. The project is often a website or software project, and the changelog usually includes records of changes such as bug fixes, new features, etc. Some open-source projects i ...

s * Graphing of relationships between issues * Sponsorship of issues *

Wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

documentation integration for

DokuWiki DokuWiki is a wiki application licensed under GPLv2 and written in the PHP programming language. It works on plain text files and thus does not need a database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki. It is often recommended as a mor ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...

, TWiki, WackoWiki, WikkaWiki and XWiki * News * Project Management & TimeTracking with CodevTT. * Localised dozens of languages on translatewiki.net.

Technical design

Development languages

MantisBT is mainly written in

PHP PHP is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementati ...

and uses SQL to interface with databases. The web-based

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

of MantisBT is written using

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

which is styled and presented using

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...

. The UI also uses the

jQuery jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. As of Aug 2022, jQuery is ...

client-side JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, often ...

library to provide optional features such as

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

and

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other s ...

powered dynamic page content. Development tools and build scripts are written predominantly in Python with some

Shell script A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...

and

. MantisBT's

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code files; thus, a codeba ...

dates back to a time when PHP's support for object-oriented programming principles was in its infancy. As of version 1.2.0, the majority of the MantisBT codebase still uses procedural programming principles, however some sections have been converted to make use of PHP 5's new object model.

Database storage

Data is stored in a

relational database management system A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relati ...

by means of the ADOdb database

abstraction Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An a ...

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vi ...

. MantisBT supports

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ...

and

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

. It has experimental support for

Microsoft SQL Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ma ...

and

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The wor ...

. MantisBT maintains a database upgrade path between

versions Version may refer to: Computing * Software version, a set of numbers that identify a unique evolution of a computer program * VERSION (CONFIG.SYS directive), a configuration directive in FreeDOS Music * Cover version * Dub version * Remix * ''Ve ...

by modifying the

database schema The database schema is the structure of a database described in a formal language supported by the database management system (DBMS). The term " schema" refers to the organization of data as a blueprint of how the database is constructed (divid ...

incrementally. During the installation of MantisBT, database schema modifications are replayed all the way back from early versions of MantisBT to reach the latest state.

Requirements

MantisBT requires a configured

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initi ...

, the

programming language interpreter and a

supported by MantisBT and ADOdb. As of June 2022, the stable branch of MantisBT requires PHP 7.0 or later. Several PHP

extensions Extension, extend or extended may refer to: Mathematics Logic or set theory * Axiom of extensionality * Extensible cardinal * Extension (model theory) * Extension (predicate logic), the set of tuples of values that satisfy the predicate * Ext ...

are required to enable specific functionality or for performance reasons; the extension for the RDBMS being used (i.e. ''mysqli'') is mandatory. MantisBT bundles a number of dependencies with each release including: * ADOdb for

of support for relational database management systems * Disposable for disposable e-mail checking functionality * eZ Components for plotting of statistics * NuSOAP for

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are used ...

web service support * PHPMailer for

sending support * Projax for

capabilities in the

* RSS Builder for

feed support * PHP UTF-8

wrapper library Wrapper libraries (or library wrappers) consist of a thin layer of code (a " shim") which translates a library's existing interface into a compatible interface. This is done for several reasons: * To refine a poorly designed or complicated interfa ...

for

internationalization In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

support in absence of PHP's mb_string extension For drawing

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties * Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discr ...

of relationships between issues, GraphViz is required. MantisBT also has an alternative dependency upon the commercial JpGraph graphics library for plotting of statistics.

References

External links

* {{Bug tracking systems Free project management software Bug and issue tracking software PHP software