All installations of Helpdesk Pilot (version 5.1 and above) has a program called hdp-manage with which operational tasks for Helpdesk Pilot can be performed. This article describes in detail the various operations that can be done.

Notes:

hdp-manage requires to be accessed as sudo. So, you will have to login to the virtual machine as 'superuser' (password: superuser) to use this tool. So, either you can perform all the commands below, with sudo prefixed, or change user to 'root' by typing sudo -s once you login as superuser
hdp-manage is self contained with the necessary help instructions, which can be seen via hdp-manage -h or hdp-manage --help

1. Control the Helpdesk Pilot service

hdp-manage service -h lists the actions that can be performed. The following are the commands for hdp-manage service,

usage: hdp-manage service [-h] {status,start,screen,stop,restart} ...

service-commands:

{status,start,screen,stop,restart}
    status             show HDP service status
    start               start HDP service
    stop                stop HDP service
    restart            restart HDP service
    screen             attach to the HDP service screen

2. Check the Helpdesk Pilot version

hdp-manage version -h

usage: hdp-manage version [-h] [--all]

  --all       display all information

3. Backup and Restore

usage: hdp-manage backup [-h] {restore,create} ...

backup-commands:
  {restore,create}
    create          create a backup of HDP data
    restore         restore a backup of HDP data

To take a backup type,

hdp-manage backup create

The path of the backup folder is printed on the screen when you do the hdp-manage backup create command.

To restore from a backup type,

hdp-manage backup restore <path of the backup folder>

4. SSL configuration

hdp-manage https -h

usage: hdp-manage https [-h] {enable,disable} ...

https-commands:
  {enable,disable}
    enable          turn HTTPS support on
    disable         turn HTTPS support off

To enable an SSL certificate on your VM,

hdp-manage https enable  --certFile CERT --keyFile KEY --caCertFile CA_CERT

 (where CERT, KEY and CA_CERT will have to be replaced by your certificate, key file and intermediate CA file)

5. Setting up the application domain name

hdp-manage set-domain-name -h

usage: hdp-manage set-domain-name [-h] DN

positional arguments:
  DN          the domain name to use for the Helpdesk website

Once you provide the domain name, the necessary apache and postfix related changes will be modified accordingly.
This command is useful when you decide to change the domain name your helpdesk application should run on.

6. Updates check and apply

usage: hdp-manage updates [-h] [--download-url URL] {check} ...

updates-commands:
    check             check for any new updates to HDP

You can check for the latest release version on our servers and apply the updates, when available. To apply the updates(this is available only on HDP 5.2)

hdp-manage updates apply

This will download and apply all the updates relevant to your installation of Helpdesk Pilot.

7. Updating License

usage: hdp-manage update-license

This command can be used when the license file for your installation has been modified. Typical use cases are like, increasing staff limit, enabling/disabling certain fetaures

8. Sending Troubleshooting Information

In case the update fails, please use the command sudo hdp-manage send-troubleshooting-info from the console, to send us the troubleshooting information. Please be advised that this mail will send some logs from your VM which will contain some data about your incoming emails, outgoing emails. So, if you wish to safeguard this information, please do not run this command.

9. Finding your Instance name and License key

hdp-manage tool env INSTANCE_ID

hdp-manage tool env LICENSE_KEY

Notes:

1. We recommend you take a snapshot of the VM before doing the update
2. Please take a backup too, via the steps mentioned above
3. Plan the update with some downtime of your helpdesk instance