RefractTrack Getting Started
Getting Started
RefractTrack is self-hosted, which means it runs on a web server your team controls rather than someone else's cloud. That sounds like more work than it is — there's a guided setup wizard that does almost everything for you.
What you need
RefractTrack needs a fairly ordinary web server: something that can run PHP and talk to a MySQL (or MariaDB) database. Most affordable web hosting plans already have both. If your team has someone who handles IT or hosting, this page is for them — everyone else can skip straight to Projects and Tasks to start learning how to actually use the board.
If you're setting up RefractTrack on a brand-new server from scratch (rather than an existing web host), there's a setup script that handles all of the server-level chores for you — installing the web server software, setting up a secure connection (https), and getting a database ready. It walks you through a few questions (what do you want to name your site? is your database on this same machine or somewhere else?) and takes care of the rest. See Automated Server Setup for the full details, including exactly what to have ready before you run it.
Running the setup wizard
Once the files are in place on your server, open the site in a browser and you'll land on a step-by-step setup wizard. It will:
- Check that your server has everything RefractTrack needs, and explain clearly if something's missing.
- Create the database tables it needs.
- Let you pick a starting color theme and give your instance a name.
- Walk you through creating your very first project and your first user account.
Once that's done, you're in — no command-line work required for day-to-day setup. (The one exception is your very first login: because RefractTrack has no public sign-up page, someone needs to create that first account. The setup wizard handles this for you automatically.)
For security, the setup wizard should only be run once — after it finishes, it locks itself out and can't be re-run against a live site by accident.
Nice URLs
RefractTrack can show clean, readable web addresses like yoursite.com/task/FE-12 instead of longer ones full of question marks and numbers. The setup wizard detects whether your server supports this automatically and turns it on for you when it can. It's purely cosmetic — everything works exactly the same either way, so don't worry if your server can't do it.
Keeping RefractTrack up to date
Updating RefractTrack to a newer version is just a matter of copying the new files onto your server — your projects, tasks, users, and uploaded attachments are always left untouched. If a new version needs any changes behind the scenes, RefractTrack notices on its own and walks an administrator through applying them with a single click the next time they log in; everyone else just sees a brief "please wait" message while that happens. There's nothing to plan around and nothing that can be forgotten.