Setting up TestLink on Linux

I was assigned the responsibility of setting up Test Link (TL) on my network and import test cases from another instance of TL running elsewhere. It was quite simple but I would still like to put it down just in case someone runs into issues or better still if someone has suggestions – More than welcome.

PS: The commands may be Linux specific but there are very less reasons why it wont work on Windows too.

1. Lay out red carpet

Test Link needs some software to run. Main ones are:

i. MySQL – the database ii. Apache – the web server iii. PHP – the scripting language

The TL documentation itself suggests a nice package XAMPP (from Apache Friends) which essentially packages all these software and presents as a single piece of software – makes life much easier. I too would suggest the same unless you have special requirements. I used XAMPP for Linux and the installation is mere unzipping of the package using the following command.

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.8a.tar.gz -C /opt

This unzips the XAMPP installation to /opt/lampp and this seems to be the mandatory location. Cursory digging on this led me to suggestions of creating a symbolic link to the folder in case you really do not want to install in /opt. Thereafter, you just do a xampp start/stop/restart for the usual errands.

2. Clean the red carpet

I am assuming you have downloaded Test Link ( I downloaded the latest stable release which is 1.7.4 at this point of time). Unzip the file that you have downloaded to the /opt/lampp/htdocs folder so that now you have the folder structure /opt/lampp/htdocs/testlink

Here are a few steps to pre-empt some issues that I faced when setting up testlink. They are in the order in which I faced the issues. 

i. Set register_globals to Off (by default it is On) in the /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini file

ii. Assign relevant privileges to the testlink folder. I do a:

chmod -R 777 /opt/lampp/htdocs/testlink

but you can choose to be more specific with the access levels and files

Now, run the TL installation from http://localhost/testlink/install/index.php

iii. Increase the memory limit in the following file /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini by changing the value in the following line to something that suits you. From my experience 32M works well.

memory_limit= 8M

iv. In my case, I was supposed to import the test suite from another test link instance. The problem I faced was during importing the test suite xml file. By default the limit on file size while importing is 200 Kb ( a test link characteristic). You can change this by editing the following line in the /opt/lampp/htdocs/testlink/config.inc.php file (information source)

define(‘TL_IMPORT_LIMIT’, ‘204800’); // in bytes

3. Clean the red carpet

Your TL installation is available on http://localhost/testlink