One recurring subject on the bugzilla
support mailing list
is the installation of the Perl modules that Bugzilla
requires to function. When you are installing on a Linux distribution, the
recommended course of action is to use the packages supplied by the
distribution. But, on some distributions, these can be of a version lower than
what is required by Bugzilla.

One such distribution is RHEL. Version 7 came out in 2014 and its long support life
cycle make it popular for people to use it as a base for their bugzilla
instance. Using Bugzilla 4.4 is easy because all Bugzilla’s mandatory Perl
packages are available by default but Bugzilla 5.0 came out after RHEL7 was
released and a number of Perl modules aren’t available or are outdated. Users
then try to install the missing modules themselves, which is something easy to
get wrong. I decided to see if this could be made simpler.

My first step was to see if the modules could be supplied in EPEL, a third-party
software repository for RHEL and CentOS but some of the modules concerned are
in RHEL which makes them impossible to update via EPEL. Another solution is the
use of Fedora’s COPR, an easy way for Fedora developers to maintain third party
repositories for Fedora and/or RHEL.

It took some amount of tweaking to find the package versions that allow you
to run Bugzilla 5.0.x without replacing RHEL7’s entire Perl stack but the end
result is here. Activating a COPR repo is pretty straightforward:

  • dnf install dnf-plugins-core
  • dnf copr enable eseyman/bugzilla-5.0

At which point, you can install bugzilla just like any other
application:

  • dnf install bugzilla

The bugzilla package will be updated everytime a new version of Bugzilla is
released and its support will end when the Bugzilla developers end support for
the 5.0 branch.