Up to Debian Squeeze there was the old bugzilla3 package containing Bugzilla 3.6 - a not so recent version of Bugzilla. Since Debian Wheezy there is no official Bugzilla package in the repositories anymore due to the efforts needed to get Bugzilla compliant with Debian’s packaging guidelines. The Bugzilla team recommends an installation from source which I found acceptable since the installation is contained in a single directory.

For the basic installation of Bugzilla (I tested with versions 4.2.6 and 4.4) I followed these advices while using SQLite. Make sure to refer to the next section while installing the dependencies.

Dependencies

The required dependencies can be installed in two ways: system-wide via apt or locally via Bugzilla’s own install-module.pl.

For Debian Wheezy the following packages can be installed via apt in sufficient versions:

libtimedate-perl libdatetime-perl libdatetime-timezone-perl libdbi-perl libtemplate-perl libemail-send-perl liburi-perl liblist-moreutils-perl libmath-random-isaac-perl

For SQLite install libdbd-sqlite3-perl, too.

Some optional modules also are available via apt:

libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-scrubber-perl libwww-perl libmailtools-perl libxml-twig-perl libauthen-sasl-perl libnet-smtp-ssl-perl patchutils

But two required dependencies are missing, namely Email::MIME and List::MoreUtils (version too old in Wheezy), those you’ll get with:

apt-get install make   # In my case make was missing, maybe gcc too
/usr/bin/perl install-module.pl Email::MIME
/usr/bin/perl install-module.pl List::MoreUtils

Web Server (Nginx)

Afterwards you can continue to set up your web server - Nginx in my case. Since Bugzilla is optimized for CGI usage which is per se unsupported in Nginx, you either have to use a FastCGI wrapper or another CGI-capable web server (like Lighttpd) via HTTP proxying.

I followed this instructions to get it running on Nginx. A slightly different flavor is described here.