Fabiux's Blog

I'm finally back on one of my favourite toys: jAPS 2.0 entando. Version 2 has lots of cool improvements, so go to the official project website and read more about it!

I needed a small server in order to deploy and test the portal system, so I decided to use Linux Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) server on a small virtual machine. Here's some technical information in the hope they can be useful to users and/or developers who want to spend a small amount of resources and get a fully functional test environment.

Please, always refer to the jAPS 2.0 entando official documentation, and in particular this wiki page, where you can find all necessary information not reported here.

The best place where to put a small Entando portable server was my ultralight Compaq Mini netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) aboard (Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor, actually two of them thanks to SMP kernel; 1GB RAM). This small device is usually connected to my home LAN.

Virtualization has been made by Virtualbox, but of course you can choose alternative systems. I've installed virtualbox-ose package (and all required dependencies) in the host computer (my netbook). My virtual machine (the guest server) provides a (virtual) hard disk of 4.6 GB (33% used after OS installation) and about 480 MB RAM. I set up a bridge for network connection (static IP address in my case, but you can also use DHCP of course).

Using the Virtualbox GUI I've installed a minimalistic Linux Ubuntu 10.04 server, an LTS release. I only included ssh server, PostgreSQL and Tomcat server during the installation process. Anyway, here's a list of required packages: openssh-server, postgresql, tomcat6. Installation and use of sun-java6-jdk is strongly encouraged (see official documentation): in order to install this package you have to uncomment the following two lines in file /etc/apt/sources.list:

Update your apt lists after editing.

In order to connect to my guest server (named entando) it has been useful to append the following line to the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

Key exchange is also useful to quickly ssh, scp and rsync between my workstation and the guest server.

You can complete all remaining configuration via ssh and you don't need to use Virtualbox GUI anymore to do this: shut down your guest server and restart it again by using VBoxHeadless (I wrote a simple bash script to do this – entando is the name of my virtual machine):

Don't forget to install the file postgresql-8.3-604.jdbc3.jar (read official documentation and download it). I put this file under /usr/share/java but I also provided a symlink under /usr/share/tomcat6/lib:

About Tomcat, all configuration files are under /etc/tomcat6 (as usually). In particular, the following specification

is already defined under Ubuntu 10.04. The file web.xml is also under /etc/tomcat6 .

Append the following line to the file /etc/default/tomcat6 :

For Tomcat Manager, configure the file /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml . In my case I wrote down the following one, but you may need something more complex than mine:

Restart Tomcat when you are done.

Finally, read documentation, use Eclipse and deploy your portals, for example by using Tomcat Manager. Here's how I solved a small issue and a workaround about deploying a test portal (probably my fault, I will go under further investigation with that). Under Eclipse, read the file <ProjectName>/WebContent/META-INF/context.xml : there are several references to /home/eu location. As a temporary solution, I've changed those into /home/entando . Then I created a /home/entando directory on the server (ownership root:tomcat6, with write permissions for group). All went fine.

Resulting system is fast enough to be used as an effective test development environment for jAPS 2.0 entando. Enjoy this cool open source software!