Installing Alfresco 3.3 on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx LTS (10.04)

I happily reused my previous installing Alfresco post to provide you with a new post detailing the setup of the forthcoming Alfresco release on the forthcoming Ubuntu release.

I'm still trying to figure a proper way to format content, but it should be readable at all times.

Note that lines starting with a # (in typable commands) mean they should be executed as root. There's many ways to do this, my advice would be to prepend the commands with sudo. I'm trying to visually distuingish everything you need to type yourself (as opposed to shell output or existing file contents), but I'm human so I will make mistakes every now and then. Quick tip: if you can't write a file from vim because you opened as non-root, use :w !sudo tee % to write the file using sudo.

Start with updating your system:

# apt-get update

Install Tomcat, MySQL and mysql-connector:

# apt-get install tomcat6 mysql-server libmysql-java

Edit /etc/default/tomcat6:

...
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
JAVA_OPTS="${JAVA_OPTS} -Xms512m -Xmx512m"
...

In contrary to in Ubuntu 9.04, the Tomcat security manager is disabled by default in 10.04. I guess this means that the security manager is more of a problem than a solution, so I'm already feeling better about not using it.

Create the Alfresco directory tree:

# mkdir /opt/alfresco
# cd /opt/alfresco
# wget http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/nightly/dist/alfresco-community-war-3.3.tar.gz
# tar xf alfresco-community-war-3.3.tar.gz

You can use something else instead of /opt, but it seems to me this is a desirable location.

I consider myself somewhat experienced with Alfresco, so I'm not downloading the sample extensions...

Create Alfresco database and user:

$ mysql -u root -p < extras/databases/mysql/db_setup.sql

Create Alfresco and Tomcat directories:

# mkdir -p /srv/alfresco/alf_data
# mkdir -p /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes

I'm using /srv as data root, I should also move the shared/classes to that location. In my previous guide I used /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/lib/ as base for additional JARs (in this case the mysql-connector), but the default config assumes that these JARs reside in /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/, so I'm not going to deviate from that assumption.

Add links to war files to tomcat webapps:

# ln -s /opt/alfresco/alfresco.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/
# ln -s /opt/alfresco/share.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/

Add mysql connector to path where tomcat finds it:

# ln -s /usr/share/java/mysql-connector-java.jar /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/

Setup Alfresco global settings:

# cp /opt/alfresco/extensions/extension/alfresco-global.properties /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes/

Edit the just copied file:

...
#dir.root=./alf_data
dir.root=/srv/alfresco/alf_data
...

It seems that in some cases it's necessary to also include the hibernate dialect in this config file. You can do so by adding the following line:

...
hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLInnoDBDialect

Create the Alfresco extension root:

# mkdir -p /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/

This directory is used to override alfresco configuration without changing the deployed WAR.

Setup logging in /var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-log4j.properties:

log4j.rootLogger=error, File

log4j.appender.File=org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender
log4j.appender.File.File=/var/log/tomcat6/alfresco.log
log4j.appender.File.Append=true
log4j.appender.File.DatePattern='.'yyyy-MM-dd
log4j.appender.File.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.File.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %-5p [%c] %m%n

Make sure permissions are reasonable:

# chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 /var/lib/tomcat6 /srv/alfresco

Restart Tomcat and enjoy!

# /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

Now you should be able to reach Alfresco on [ip]:8080/alfresco and Alfresco Share on [ip]:8080/share.