So there seems to be this thing about snap and snappy apps and suchlike. I have no idea, I’ve dipped my toes in to it, but it seems like Snappy is the structure on which snaps are placed that interact with each other like little virtual instances on your main virtual instance (or dedicated piece of hardware), providing modularised services to each other to create a website. I think WordPress can be a snap, and so too can Nextcloud. I’ve tried installing the Nextcloud site as a snap as per this Digital Ocean guide but came up with nothing good, it came apart during the Let’s Encrypt SSL stage. So I installed it just as I used to, following these instructions here from TechRepublic and a bit of this to allow for the utf8mb4 thingy.
With everything in place, OTRS was a doddle, though ironically (I think, I’d have to check with Alanis Morrisette), OTRS insisted on having the SQL database configured in utf8.
So, it would seem that my master database is set up with the best version of utf8 character encoding (utf8mb4) which allows 4 bytes per character and is compatible with all the world’s alphabets (maybe Tolkien and Trek languages too!) and emoticons.🏆 Which is great for WordPress. Regular utf8 encoding is 3 bytes per character, and lacks all alphabets and emoticons, a bit of a botch job fixed by MySQL when utf8mb4 came along, but never removed. This is all from various forums I read up in the last few days.
Within your MySQL installation, each database can have its own character encoding, so regardless of the SQL master database being utf8mb4, it was no issue creating a database just for OTRS that was utf8. OTRS offers to create the database for you, or use an existing DB but can only make the new one when the master DB is utf8. That being so, I just created its database with utf8 as required, within phpmyadmin. So it is nice that WordPress is on utf8mb4, but for OTRS, the whole rip-it-up-and-start-again needn’t have happened. All good practice though. The standard instructions to OTRS install on their website was easy enough, with some slight tweakages in how I set up my sites-available/enabled and conf-available/enabled creating the links the a2ensite and a2enconf commands. It was the second or third time through playing with the OTRS install anyway.
(In Apache, the configuration files are named *.conf and are stored in /etc/apache2/mods-available and conf-available and sites-available . They’re activated by linking the conf files within, to similar folders named mods-enabled conf-enabled and sites-enabled. In the instructions for WordPress and Nextcloud installs, the right way to make that link is with an apache commands a2ensite site.conf a2enconf config.conf a2enmod mod.conf and similarly a2dissite a2dissconf a2dismod to break that link, to take a site offline or disable a configuration. Here endeth the parenthesis.)
More recently, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the OTRS system itself and how it might best suit my place of work.