• Tracking Changes In RT
  • Migrating changes from test RT to production RT

Tracking Changes In RT

Many organizations run a test RT in addition to their production system so they can test changes before deploying them on their live instance. This approach is a great way to try things before changing production, but one challenge is that you need to repeat any updates you make in the test environment step-by-step in your production environment.

The rt-dump-initialdata tool included with RT provides a way to track these changes in your test environment and export them so you can then import them in your production environment. Using this tool, you can create new queues, groups, scrips, and even grant rights, then export all of the new configuration into a readable format.

Note that this utility is not a replacement for traditional database back-ups.

Migrating changes from test RT to production RT

As described above, let's look at an example of how you would make some changes on a test RT server and then migrate them to a production server. We'll assume that the configuration information between these two instances is the same (same queues, groups, scripts, etc.). There are ways to still use these tools if there are differences, but you'll have the best results if they are in sync.

A good first step before starting is to validate that your RT data is valid:

    sbin/rt-validator --check

If rt-validator reports any issues, it's good to investigate and fix those first.

Next, take a JSON initialdata dump of our in dev RT:

    sbin/rt-dump-initialdata --sync --directory base

This should create a new directory "base" that contains a file "initialdata.json" with your RT configuration. This contains information like queue configuration, groups, custom fields, scripts, etc. It does not contain ticket data, transactions, attachments, etc. The --sync option includes the ids of various objects from the database to aid in finding updated records.

Now say you want to add a new rights configuration to your "Support" queue and also want to create a new scrip to automate some part of the support process. You can make these changes on the test RT and save. Once you are happy with the changes, run rt-dump-initialdata again to output the changes:

    sbin/rt-dump-initialdata --sync --directory new --base base/initialdata.json

For this run, --base should point to the directory you created in the previous step.

When you run it, a new directory "new" is created. The directory will have another "initialdata.json" file along with a "changes.json" file that only has the differences between the base and new RT initialdata. For this example our changes file will have our new queue, some rights configurations and the new scrip we created:

    {
        "ACL" : [
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "SystemInternal",
                "GroupType" : "Everyone",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "CreateTicket"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "SystemInternal",
                "GroupType" : "Everyone",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "ReplyToTicket"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "RT::Queue-Role",
                "GroupType" : "AdminCc",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "CommentOnTicket"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "RT::Queue-Role",
                "GroupType" : "AdminCc",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "SeeQueue"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "RT::Queue-Role",
                "GroupType" : "AdminCc",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "ReplyToTicket"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "RT::Queue-Role",
                "GroupType" : "AdminCc",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "CreateTicket"
            },
            {
                "GroupDomain" : "RT::Queue-Role",
                "GroupType" : "AdminCc",
                "ObjectId" : "Support",
                "ObjectType" : "RT::Queue",
                "RightName" : "ShowTicket"
            }
        ],
        "Queues" : [
            {
                "CommentAddress" : "",
                "CorrespondAddress" : "",
                "Description" : "",
                "Lifecycle" : "default",
                "Name" : "Support",
                "SLADisabled" : 1,
                "SortOrder" : 0
            }
        ],
        "Scrips" : [
            {
                "CustomCommitCode" : "",
                "CustomIsApplicableCode" : "",
                "CustomPrepareCode" : "",
                "Description" : "On Support Request Do Something",
                "Queue" : [
                    {
                    "ObjectId" : "Support",
                    "SortOrder" : 18,
                    "Stage" : "TransactionCreate",
                    "id" : 37
                    }
                ],
                "ScripAction" : "User Defined",
                "ScripCondition" : "User Defined",
                "Template" : "Blank"
            }
        ]
    }

On your production RT, add the following configuration if you haven't done so previously:

    Set( $InitialdataFormatHandlers, [ 'RT::Initialdata::JSON' ] );

You can now apply the changes.json initialdata to your production RT:

    sbin/rt-setup-database --action insert --datafile new/changes.json

The output is JSON, so is human-readable. You can view the contents to confirm it contains what you expect before running against your production instance.