RT Documentation Now Online

In the past, the best source for RT documentation was the codebaseitself where you could use the trusty perldoc command to find all of the embedded documentation. You also had the RT Essentials book for general concepts and architecture.

These days, most of us are very used to tabbing into our browser's search box and asking the internet to magically find the answers to our vaguely worded questions. Searches for RT questions typically find the community wiki, mailing list archives, and occasionally a link to source code in Github.

Today this changes.

All of the documentation embedded in the RT source is now easily accessible on the Best Practical website, and web searches will start to return results that link to official documentation. Each page indicates which RT version it's for, so you'll know you're not looking at the documentation for the wrong RT version. We'll be updating the site with documentation for each currently supported major version of RT going forward.

What's There

The documentation is in a few major categories:

  • Install and Upgrade: for getting started or moving to a new version

  • User: aimed at explaining features and how to do things

  • Utilities: docs for all of the utilities delivered with RT, from the rt command-line interface tool to rt-crontool to rt-server

  • Developer: core documentation on all of the Perl modules that make up RT

  • Actions and Conditions: core RT actions and conditions available for Scrips and rt-crontool

More to Come

Even though this documentation has been public and available for years, publishing it to the web site gives it a new level of visibility. This shows where our docs need some work (yes, we see it too). We'll continue to improve, correct, and add to the documentation over time.

You can help by submitting documentation patches if you find areas that could be improved or are incorrect. Part of the published doc includes instructions for getting started contributing patches. You can also browse the code and doc on Github and use their web editing feature to make changes and submit pull requests easily.

We hope you find the docs useful. Let us know what you think.

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