Early testers, the time is finally here! The beta 1 release of RT 6.0.0, the next major version of Request Tracker, is now available for testing. You can download here:
https://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/devel/rt-6.0.0beta1.tar.gz
https://download.bestpractical.com/pub/rt/devel/rt-6.0.0beta1.tar.gz.asc
SHA-256 sums
5d739833a98fe541633965789f4029a6386ca27086bd6559ac925c21ee5a1aac rt-6.0.0beta1.tar.gz
cc41180f37025056fb10039bffcc1fa6c548323e6b74c0cf5f2161dd121a5822 rt-6.0.0beta1.tar.gz.asc
We’re still working, but this version has the big changes we plan to release as RT 6.0.0. Our recent blog posts point to some of the new features you might want to experiment with. Also, please check the upgrade documentation for details on some changes. And of course you can always check the commits in Github. Here are some testing notes:
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As with all major updates, do not try to install on top of an existing /opt/rt5. We expect you to do the base install into a new /opt/rt6 (or other custom) directory, then import your database and other code for upgrading.
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The database update steps are automated, as always. We have moved some things around in the database, most notably dashboards and saved searches. Please let us know if you see any errors while upgrading or if any dashboards or saved searches have issues after upgrading.
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Related to the above, we aligned and streamlined some rights for saved searches and dashboards. If a user can’t see something, it might be rights. Additional details are available in the upgrading docs.
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We have prepared RT 6 versions of many of our popular public extensions. If you want to test with these, go to our Github account, find the extension, then look for a branch called rt6-updates (or something similar).
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If you have local extensions or customizations, especially things that change the web UI, you will very likely need to make some updates. In previous releases, older code could “mostly” work. For example in RT 5, RT 4.4 custom UI code looked out of place, but would generally work. That likely won’t be the case with this update. Check the developer update documentation for the big things that have changed.
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With the addition of htmx, things have gotten more javascripty. If you encounter some strange behavior, it will help us if you open your developer tools and look in the console and network tabs for hints. The information there will also help in bug reports.
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A big new feature we haven’t talked about yet is page layouts and corresponding updates to dashboards. (We even left it out of the upgrading docs for now.) You can find the dashboard editor in the same place as in RT 5. The new page layout features are at Admin > Page Layouts.
Feel free to reply to this post with any thoughts, questions, or bugs. Being an early tester is a great way to find out if any new changes will impact your particular way of using Request Tracker. Thanks for your help!