Mantis Bug Tracker

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

Plug-ins

An event-driven plug-in system was introduced with the release of 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 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 feeds are available for users who wish to keep track of issues that have been resolved. Additionally, MantisBT has integration with Twitter via a plugin, to allow a notification to be tweeted when an issue is resolved.

Via MantisBT's event-driven plug-in system, it is possible to extend the built in notification support to run advanced scripts that perform additional notification actions (such as sending SMS messages or updating statuses in external project management systems).

Revision control system integration

Versions of MantisBT prior to 1.2.0 allowed for limited integration with the CVS revision control system. With the introduction of plug-in 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 GitHub, GitWeb, SourceForge 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 web-based providers:

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

Development languages

MantisBT is mainly written in PHP and uses SQL to interface with databases. The web-based user interface of MantisBT is written using HTML which is styled and presented using CSS. The UI also uses the jQuery client-side JavaScript library to provide optional features such as Ajax and JSON powered dynamic page content.

Development tools and build scripts are written predominantly in Python with some Shell script and PHP.

MantisBT's codebase 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 by means of the ADOdb database abstraction library. MantisBT supports MySQL. Support for other databases ( PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle ) is known to be problematic. The development team are looking to fix this for the 2.0 release.

MantisBT maintains a database upgrade path between versions by modifying the database schema 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, the PHP programming language interpreter and a relational database management system supported by MantisBT and ADOdb.

The stable branch of MantisBT (version numbers within 1.2.x) requires PHP 5.1.0 or later. For the development branch (1.3.x), the minimum PHP version is 5.3.2.

Several PHP extensions 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:

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