GRIA Basic Application Services Installation

Introduction

The GRIA Basic Application Services software itself is contained within a single WAR (or "web archive") file gria-basic-app-services.war, located within the /war directory of this package. Once the pre-requisites have been set-up and the war file has been deployed to Tomcat, the web-based administration interface guides the user through the rest of the installation process.

Upgrading

If you have 5.x version of this package already installed, you can upgrade it to the lastest version without having to perform a completely new installation. This can be done via the Tomcat Web Application Manager using the following procedure:

1. Start up Tomcat and select "Tomcat Manager" from the Administration menu.
2. Locate the package from the Applications sections.
3. Select undeploy from the Commands column.
4. On WinXP only you should start and stop tomcat
5. Scroll down to the WAR file to deploy subsection, within the Deploy section. Beside the "Select WAR file to upload" box, click the browse icon and select the WAR file from the unpacked distribution.
6. Click the Deploy button. An OK message at the top of the page indicates that the WAR has been successfully deployed to Tomcat.

System Requirements

This software will run on many operating systems. Currently, we provide documented instructions for installation on the following:

• SuSE 9.3 - 10.1
• Fedora Core 3, 4,  and 5
• Windows XP

GRIA has also been installed on RedHat and Debian with minor changes to the installation/configuration instructions (please contact GRIA support if you require assistance with these or other operating systems). However, our recommended platform to use is SuSE - this Linux distribution contains all of the prerequisites required for GRIA, is straightforward to maintain and patch, and is the platform that this software has undergone the most amount of testing with.

Whichever operating system you install the GRIA Basic Application Services on, the prerequisites are Tomcat, Java, and Perl .

• 1 GHz CPU
• 256 Mb RAM
• 1 Gb free disk space

Preparing Your System

• SuSE 9.3 - 10.1
• Fedora Core 3
• Fedora Core 4
• Fedora Core 5
• Windows XP

Deploying the Services to Tomcat

The next steps require the use of a web browser to complete the war file deployment.

1. Using a web browser, load the main Tomcat server page (e.g. http://<servername>:8080) and select the "Tomcat Manager" link.

   N.B. "<servername>" should be replaced with the IP address or fully qualified hostname of the computer running the Tomcat server.

   You will be prompted for a username and password to be entered before displaying the manager page. Use "admin" as the username and enter the password that selected either by using the Tomcat installer (WinXP) or by editing the <TOMCAT_HOME>/conf/tomcat-users.xml (Linux) .

2. The page which loads once login has been successful presents the following sections:
   • Manager - lists the command controls and help functions
   • Applications - lists the applications currently deployed within Tomcat
   • Deploy - options for deploying applications to Tomcat
   • Server Information - lists specific information on Tomcat and the base platform it was installed to

   Scroll down to the WAR file to deploy subsection, within the Deploy section. Beside the "Select WAR file to upload" box, click the browse icon and select the gria-basic-app-services.war file, before clicking the "Deploy" button:

3. An "OK" message at the top of the page indicates that the war has been successfully deployed to Tomcat.

GRIA Basic Application Services should now also be listed within the Applications section. Note here in the last column is where individual applications may be started, stopped, reloaded or if desired undeployed completely from within Tomcat.

This completes the first part of the installation and deployment of GRIA Basic Application Services.

Configuring the Service

Having successfully deployed the war file, you can invoke it by just clicking on this /gria-basic-app-services from the Applications section.

Alternatively you can invoke the web application via: http://<servername>:8080/gria-basic-app-services.

N.B. "<servername>" should be replaced with the IP address or fully qualified hostname of the computer running the Tomcat server.

On starting the web application you will be presented with a login dialog box. You need to log in as a user with the gria_basic_app_services_admin tomcat role. You can create this role by editing the tomcat-users.xml file as above. Click Cancel in the login dialog box if you need more detailed instructions.

If you get a 401 Not Authorized error without being prompted to log in, then this probably means that the Java compiler isn't working (check for errors in the catalina.out log file). The usual cause of this is trying to run tomcat immediately after installing Java. You must log out and log in again to ensure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the correct location.

Once you have logged in, the web application will guide you through the rest of the installation process.

Uninstalling the Services

Note the instructions given below are for removing this software package only. Should you wish to also remove its pre-requisites, then you must follow the instructions provided with them.

1. Stop Tomcat (and if you are using is Apache) 
2. Next remove the directory <TOMCAT_HOME>/webapps/gria-basic-app-services and the file <TOMCAT_HOME>/webapps/gria-basic-app-services.war which will have been copied when the web application was deployed.
3. Delete the tutorial application directory, e.g. /opt/tutorial-apps.
4. Delete the platform scripts directory, e.g./opt/gria-platform-scripts.
5. Delete the configuration directory, e.g./etc/gria./basic-app-services
6. Delete data store directory, e.g. /data
7. Edit <TOMCAT_HOME>/conf/tomcat-users.xml file and remove the gria_basic_app_services_admin role and user.