500 error with osTicket installation on Parallels Plesk panel

We use Parallels Plesk and occasionally have need of some of (generally) useful bundled applications which come with the Linux flavour of Plesk.

One the funky application bundles we've come across is osTicket. a neat little ticketing system provided by the lovely people over at www.osticket.com. This Open Source system seems to tick all the boxes as far as our needs were concerned for an independent project and seemed to be a doddle when reading through the installation of the version we wanted (v1.8.1.2) so we took a look at the local catalogue version which came with Plesk and thought - that'll do us.

The thing about the bundled applications with Plesk is that they do somewhat "take care" of the installation which bugged me a little bit as I wanted to have little more control over the installation.

So of I headed to get the local version of the catalog (APS) application and started the install. (btw this assumes you've set up the subscription into Plesk and have a domain mapped etc)

 

so clicking on the applications tab showed me (after a search for ticket) that is was in fact available (plesk 11.5 shown) so I adopted the "I want control" install option by clicking the small side arrow and choosing install (custom). Then I was presented with a number of dialog screens including one for additional options which allowed me to add in a database I had already created (there's no problem with allowing it to add it for you, I just had one myself)

 

The installation went fine after that until....I tried to browse to the live installation and got the dreaded 500 Server error. Now these errors, with the white page from hell which tells you absolutely nothing about the error which has caused the application to die, you need to open the error log file and see what that tells you.

 

In Plesk the error logs are location in the domain's file system in a logs folder thus:

which are accessible through FTP. Downloading the error log file and opening it in Notepad ++ I saw this:

 



I fixed the error about premature end of script which was some erroneous white space at the end of an include file (not of my doing) and then then focussed on the mod_fcgid warning. This was quite an odd one as it pointed to the FastCGI module not behaving itself. (Having seen these before I've seen the issue fixed with a hosting settings selection so tried it out)

 

In the Plesk Hosting Settings for the domain (Websites & Domains > {domain} > Hosting Settings)



clicking on the hosting settings will let you make any minor configuration changes to the subscription:

 

The thing to try out is changing the FastCGI option back to the CGI application type and then saving this configuration back into the subscription. I've found that normally this doesn't need any server restarts or the like and lo! the change worked - I refreshed the page for the 500 Server Error and the application started behaving as it should.

 

 

 

Hope this helps some other poor soul who has been pulling their hair out trying to configure osTicket - it looks like a top system just installing it can be a total pain!