I'm trying to deploy Mantis BT on Heroku, using PostgreSQL as the database, as a proof of concept and learning exercise (or perhaps more accurately, as a "climb up a steep learning curve," since I'm a total newbie to all three technologies).
The deploy of the PHP app to Heroku went fine, and accessing the app's URL brings up its admin/install.php page. Provisioning the PostgreSQL database went fine, and gave me a database URL that (obfuscated) looks like this:
postgres://useruseruser:passwordpasswordpassword@ec2-107-21-219-201.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/dbnamedbname
I'm able to access the database via psql using those credentials, and the user (predictably) doesn't have the 'usecreatedb' privilege. I can't really make sense of the output of the PostgreSQL \z command, which seems to say I have no privileges on a table I've created:
dbnamedbname=> \z foo;
Access privileges
Schema | Name | Type | Access privileges | Column access privileges
--------+------+-------+-------------------+--------------------------
public | foo | table | |
(1 row)
but I put that impression down to not really knowing PostgreSQL's idioms yet.
Empirically I've been able to determine that I have the privileges CREATE (for both tables & indexes), SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, ALTER and DROP, which seem to be what Mantis BT requires for its "high-privileged database account."
So, it would seem that I have everything I need to fill in the Mantis BT admin/install.php form:
- Hostname: ec2-107-21-219-201.compute-1.amazonaws.com
- Username: useruseruser
- Password: passwordpasswordpassword
- Database: dbnamedbname
- Admin Username: useruseruser
- Admin Password: passwordpasswordpassword
Two notes here:
- Yes, I know the regular DB user should not have all the privileges the Admin user has, but Heroku has only given me one DB username, and (because this is for now just a proof of concept) I didn't want to start down a possible blind alley of trying -- and failing -- to create a second user just yet.
- The Mantis BT form says that the Admin username and password are "to create Database if required." Since the database ("dbnamedbname") already exists, I initially thought I could leave these blank, but Mantis BT insists on having values for them (and the install documentation says that if they are not supplied, "the database user will be used").
Yet, when I fill in the form using the values above and click the "Install/Upgrade Database" button, I get a failure indicating that the app could not connect to the database with the credentials provided (the exact same credentials, BTW, that I used to connect to the database using psql):
(One suspicious thing in the above screenshot -- that I haven't yet steeled myself to go hunting for in the code: the obscured Admin password in the page returned by the form submission only shows six bullets, whereas the actual password I pasted was 30 characters long.)
So, questions to anyone who understands how Mantis BT database setup works.
- Is it actually passing only six characters worth of password to the DB server, or is that just a UI glitch?
- Even after I figure out why it's not connecting to the database -- if that's really true -- is the notation "to create Database if required" (on the Admin username and password entries) really significant? Or will the silly thing go and try to create the database even though the specified database already exists?
- If the answer to 2 above is "Yes, it will try to create the database anyway," what's the recommended way to work around that, given how Heroku goes about provisioning PostgreSQL databases?
