Introduction to the Issuetrak Deployment Utility (IDU)

The Issuetrak Deployment Utility (IDU) is the command line utility for deploying Issuetrak. The IDU is an interactive deployment tool designed to provide maximum power and flexibility for the system administrator that needs fine control over how Issuetrak is deployed. Working with the IDU requires proficiency with PowerShell or the Command Prompt on Windows Server. Viewing, editing, and making sense of a JSON file are all necessary to successfully complete a deployment of Issuetrak using the IDU. If a more familiar graphical installation or upgrade experience is desired, please consider using the Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM) instead.

The IDU can be used to install or upgrade single or multiple sites, apply your site ID, generate an API key, and more.

In order to get useful results, we must specify a verb to the IDU when we use it. Only one verb may be specified at runtime. A list of possible verbs (and a brief description of each) can be called by simply executing the IDU with no options from a console window. Additional information about the usage of verbs can be found in the IDU Verbs article.

The IDU requires that a JSON configuration file be provided for many of its functions to be carried out. JSON is short for JavaScript Object Notation. For the purposes of our documentation, most references to JSON configuration files will be shortened to just the JSON, or similar. The IDU can be instructed to scan the web server for current Issuetrak instances and generate a JSON based upon the results of its scan. We also provide JSON files that can be used as a base and customized to suit your environment and needs. We'll go more in-depth into the JSON in the article Working With the JSON.

The IDU can also be instructed to deploy a particular context of Issuetrak. That is, we can choose to deploy only the web, database, services, or all of Issuetrak. This can be useful for isolating different portions of Issuetrak to different servers for load-balancing and auto-scaling.

The example below will execute the IDU with no parameters, which will output an abbreviated ‘help’ explanation.

.\issuetrak.deployment.utility

Now that we‘ve given you a high-level overview of the IDU, let’s take a look at what it can do. Click here to see the IDU verb documentation.


You can find more about Issuetrak Deployment Fundamentals here.