MantisBT is a web based bug tracking system that was first made available to the public in November 2000. Over time it has matured and gained a lot of popularity, and now it has become one of the most popular open source bug/issue tracking systems. MantisBT is developed in PHP, with support to multiple database backends including MySQL, MS SQL, PostgreSQL and DB2. MantisBT, as a PHP script, can run on any operating system that is supported by PHP and has support for one of the DBMSes that are supported. MantisBT is known to run fine on Windows, Linux, OS/2, Mac OS X, System i and a variety of Unix operating systems.

This manual is targeted for the person responsible for evaluating, installing and maintaing MantisBT in a company. Typically we refer to this person as the MantisBT administrator.

MantisBT is released under the terms of GNU General Public License (GPL). MantisBT is free to use and modify. It is free to redistribute as long as you abide by the distribution terms of the GPL.

MantisBT is available in several Linux distributions including: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Frugalware and others. Hence, if you are running Linux, start by checking if your distribution has a package for MantisBT. If not, or if the package is not up-to-date with the latest MantisBT version, then you may want to download it directly from here. For Windows, Mac OS X and other operating systems, use the link provided above to download MantisBT. The download is compressed in tar.gz or zip format. Both formats can be unpacked using tools like 7-Zip (in case of Windows). Note that at any point in time there are typically two "latest" MantisBT releases that are available for download. The latest production release (stable), and the latest development release which can be an alpha or a release candidate. It is not recommended to use development releases in production specially if it is still in the alpha stage unless the administrator is familiar with PHP and is able to troubleshoot and fix any issues that may arise.

When initially seeking to name this project Ken ran into a problem every programmer encounters. What is a good name? It has to be descriptive, unique, and not too verbose. Additionally having multiple meanings would be a nice touch. Quickly ruled out were php*Something* names which, incidentally, although popular, do not seem to be condoned by the PHP Group developers. Drawing inspiration from Open Source projects like Apache, Mozilla, Gnome, and so forth resulted in two eventual choices: Dragonfly and Mantis. Dragonfly was already the name of a webmail package. So the name became Mantis. Praying Mantis are insects that feed primarily on other insects and bugs. They are extremely desirable in agriculture as they devour insects that feed on crops. They are also extremely elegant looking creatures. So, we have a name that is fairly distinctive and descriptive in multiple ways. The BT suffix stands for "Bug Tracker" and distinguishes this project from general usage of the word Mantis. However, over time the project was typically referred to as Mantis.

Kenzaburo Ito and a friend originally created a bug tracker as an internal tool for their pet project. A search for good, free packages came up with nothing suitable so they wrote their own. After a rewrite and cleanup it was made available to the public via the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL was chosen partly because of his belief that development tools should be cheap or free. In 2002, Ken was joined by Jeroen Latour, Victor Boctor and Julian Fitzell to be the administrators and the core development team of MantisBT. This marks a new era in MantisBT lifetime where it is now a team project.

There are plenty of resources to help answer support queries. Following are the main ones: Forums - The forums are one of the most popular destinations for getting MantisBT support. Start off by searching the forums for your questions, if not found, then go ahead and submit a question. Mailing lists - Available mailing lists are "mantisbt-announce" for announcements, "mantisbt-dev" for development issues, mantisbt-lang for localization and "mantisbt-help" for general help/support questions. There are public archives for such mailing lists. Note that only members of the mailing lists can post to them, hence, subscribe to the lists before you attempt to email them. IRC - The IRC channel is mainly used by developers to engage in in-person discussion. The recommended tool for IRC is XChat (for Linux), XChat 2 (for Windows). However, you can also use Web Chat to connect to IRC via your web browser. This is also useful when your work firewall blocks the IRC port (although there are other workarounds involving tunneling to fix this issue). Many people prefer to use IRC to ask questions to the developers and other users who are in the IRC channel. The IRC channel logs are archived and made available on the web. (TODO: add irc logs link) Wiki - The MantisBT Wiki has information related to "How To (recipes)", FAQ, feature requirements, etc. Search - A good way for locating an answer for your question or finding more information about a topic is to search across all MantisBT website and the Internet via Google or Bing. It is important to note that support questions should not be sent directly to MantisBT developers or through the MantisBT contact us pages. Use of "Contact Us" page or emailing the developer directly is available if you are after a paid support or consulting service.

There are several ways to keep up to date with MantisBT news. These include: mantisbt-announce mailing list is a very low traffic list that is used for major announcements, typically announcements about releases. All MantisBT users are encouraged to subscribe to this mailing list. The average traffic should be no more than one to two posts per month. MantisBT Blog is used to communicate announcements about new releases, topics relating to MantisBT, etc. Users are encouraged to subscribe to the RSS feed to know when new posts are posted there. Twitter is used to notify users about up-to-date details about what is happening with MantisBT development. For example, a Twitter update is automatically posted by the official bug tracker whenever an issue is resolved. Twitter users are encouraged to follow "mantisbt".

The release numbering convention we use is major.minor.micro (eg. 1.2.0rc1). Major - Indicates a very large change in the core package. Rewrites or major milestones. Minor - Significant amount of feature addition/modification. Micro - Mostly bug fixes and maintenance releases. Suffix - rc1 for first release candidate, a1 for alpha 1, etc.