Request Tracker

What Request Tracker does

Request Tracker, usually called RT, is a ticket tracking system from Best Practical. It is one of the longest-running open source projects in this category, and its repository on GitHub dates from 2009. RT is driven by email. Customers write to an address, the message becomes a ticket in a queue, and replies by email or from the web interface are added to the same ticket. It is used for customer support, IT help desks and many other internal workflows.

RT’s strength is that it adapts to almost any process. Each queue can have its own lifecycle of statuses and allowed transitions. Scrips run actions such as notifications when something happens on a ticket, and approvals can hold work until someone signs off. Rights can be granted in detail to groups and custom roles. SLAs set due dates automatically, articles store reusable answers, and assets can be tracked and linked to tickets. Dashboards, charts and saved searches, which can be emailed on a schedule, cover reporting, and time can be tracked per ticket and per user.

Help desk setup and AI

Out of the box RT is a general tracker, so a customer-facing help desk takes some configuration. Best Practical’s RT Helpdesk extension adds “waiting for support” and “waiting for customer” statuses that switch automatically when either side replies, a Support dashboard of tickets that need an answer, and a Severity field for sorting them.

Best Practical also publishes an AI extension, which it describes as open source, for suggested replies, summaries, sentiment and routing. It works with a provider you choose, including self-hosted models. An MCP server for RT is available too. Built-in GnuPG and S/MIME support can encrypt and sign email, which matters for sensitive requests.

Self-hosting Request Tracker

RT is written in Perl and installed from source with configure and make. The make fixdeps step installs most of the required CPAN modules, and some distributions also package RT. It needs Perl 5.26.3 or later and one of MySQL 8.0.31, MariaDB 10.6, PostgreSQL 13 or Oracle 18c (or later). SQLite is supported for testing only. The web server can be Apache with mod_fcgid or mod_perl, or nginx. Incoming mail is passed to RT with the rt-mailgate tool, and upgrades follow the version-specific notes in the documentation. The code is under GPL-2.0.

Hosted version

Best Practical runs Cloud RT on AWS with a 14-day free trial. The plans differ in scale, reliability and support rather than features, and higher plans add a choice of data residency. Best Practical also sells support contracts for on-premise installations.

Limitations

RT has no live chat or social messaging channels in core. Customers mainly use email, and the web interface is built for staff. Installing and upgrading a Perl application with many CPAN dependencies takes more effort than a container-based install. Turning RT into a polished customer help desk needs configuration or the Helpdesk extension.

Who it suits

RT suits organizations with complex or regulated processes, in customer support or IT, that want an email-based tracker they can shape in detail and keep for many years. Teams that want a modern, chat-first experience out of the box will be better served by Zammad or Chatwoot.