Social Software for Glassfish available!

Sun recently released its "Social Software for GlassFish". It is available through the update center for 9.1 and 9.1 UR1 releases. [Read More]

Posted at 01:10PM Jan 02, 2008 by Manveen Kaur in Web 2.0  |  Comments[0]

Debugging attempting to create a new user

After installing Roller, I tried to actually start using it. So from the main page I clicked on "New User Registration Page" to create my first user.

How could that be? I was sure I had followed all the steps meticulously. What could have gone wrong? :(

May be I was not thinking straight. I decided to call it a day and think about the problem while driving back home. Next morning, I came back and decided to do the most obvious thing- look at the logs under $CATALINA_HOME/logs/roller.log. The answer was right there. I had not set the value of search.index.dir in my roller-custom.properties, and hence the Roller app wasn't coming up properly.

Voila! Success!
Roller was pleased, and so was I!

I kept trying to browse different forums to get an answer -- but the answer was all along right there - in the roller logs!

Posted at 11:25AM May 22, 2007 by Manveen Kaur in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Installing Roller 3.1.0 on Tomcat

What do I need to install Roller 3.0.1 on Tomcat?
Here's a link to the complete installation guide for your reference.

Stay tuned for my follow up blog on installation on my favorite application server glassFish.

1. BEFORE INSTALLATION. THE SETUP. First things first. I need the following installed on my system:
   • Java 2 SE 1.4 SDK (or later)
   • Tomcat 5.X (or later)
   Make sure the following environment variables are also set- CATALINA_HOME should point to Tomcat directory installation.
   • MySQL database 4.x (or later). I got v 4.1
   For MySQL, UTF-8 support should have been enabled. If not sure look here. Also TCP/IP should be enabled in MySQL, for the JDBC calls to work.



2. UNPACK THE ROLLER DISTRIBUTION. Download the appropriate roller distribution and unpack the ZIP or TAR file.

   Set the ROLLER environment variable to the location of the roller webapps directory. For example, for Windows (if you installed Roller in c:), you would set
   set %ROLLER% = c:\apache-roller-3.1/webapp/roller

3. INSTALL REQUIRED THIRD PARTY JARS

   If you're curious why, these are not shipped in Roller due to licensing restrictions. You need-

   • Download Hibernate 3.1.2 from SourceForge

     You'll need to copy the following files from Hibernate into the Roller WEB-INF/lib directory:

     hibernate3.jar, asm-attrs.jar, asm.jar, cglib-2.1.3.jar, dom4j.1.6.1.jar , ehcache-1.1.jar, jdbc2_0-stdext.jar, jta.jar

     
     You'll also need to change the Hibernate configuration file to use the MySQL5 dialect.
   • Install JDBC Driver Jars.

     Download the J/Connector JDBC driver from mysql.com and place it in the Tomcat common/lib directory.

   • Install JavaMail and activation Jars

     Copy activation.jar and mail.jar to Tomcat common/lib.

4. CREATE ROLLER TABLES IN YOUR DATABASE.

   In this step you use an SQL script to create a new database within your MySQL installation, create a user with all privileges within that database and the tables required to run Roller.

   Execute the script in %ROLLER%/WEB-INF/dbscripts/mysql

   C> cd %ROLLER%\WEB-INF\dbscripts\mysql
   C> mysql -u root -p
   password: *****
   mysql> create database roller;
   mysql> grant all on roller.* to scott@'%' identified by 'tiger';
   mysql> grant all on roller.* to scott@'localhost' identified by 'tiger';
   mysql> use roller;
   mysql> source createdb.sql
   mysql> quit
   

5. DEPLOY ROLLER TO YOUR APPLICATION SERVER

   To deploy Roller you will need to inform Tomcat where to find the Roller installation directory, how to configure the Roller database data-source under the JNDI name jdbc/rollerdb, and how to configure the Roller email session under the JNDI name mail/Session.

   For Tomcat you can do this by creating a context configuration file named roller.xml and placing that file in the %CATALINA_HOME%/conf/Catalina/localhost directory.

   This is what roller.xml looks like. Edit the values for docBase and Resource attributes to point to the ones you're using.

   
   <Context path="/roller"
   docBase="c:/apache-roller-3.1/webapp/roller" debug="0">
   <Resource name="jdbc/rollerdb" auth="Container"
   type="javax.sql.DataSource"
   driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
   url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/roller?autoReconnect=true&
   useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8&mysqlEncoding=utf8"
   username="scott"
   password="tiger"
   maxActive="20"
   maxIdle="3"
   removeAbandoned="true"
   maxWait="3000" />
   <!-- If you want e-mail features, un-comment the section below -->
   <Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container"
   type="javax.mail.Session" mail.smtp.host="mailhost.example.com" /> 
   </Context>
   
   

6. Check your internationalization settings

   Configure your application server and your web server to use UTF-8 encoding because Roller's does I18N by using UTF-8 encoding for everything. Also Check your application server's URI encoding setting!

   Make sure that your web application server uses UTF-8 to encode URI's. In Tomcat the URI encoding is specified in the connectors that are configured in the Tomcat configuration file conf/server.xml. Here's a connector with the URI encoding attribute set properly:

   <Connector port="8080" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" .....
   URIEncoding="UTF-8" />
   

7. Setup Roller data directories

   Roller stores file uploads, search index files, cache files and log files on disk. Make sure the following directories that Roller expects exist and are writable by the Tomcat process.

   • Uploads directory: ${user.home}/roller_data/uploads Where ${user.home}is the Java system property that normally evaluates to the home directory of the user identity executing the server's JVM process.
   • Search-index directory: ${user.home}/roller_data/search-index
   • Logs directory: ${catalina.base}/logs/roller.log



8. Review Roller configuration

   • Review the WEB-INF/classes/roller.properties file To override the properties, define a roller-custom.properties file and place it in $CATALINA_HOME/common/classes/roller-custom.properties

     uploads.dir=/app/roller/roller_data/uploads
     search.index.dir=/app/roller/roller_data/search-index
     passwds.encryption.enabled=true
     # other values you may want to override
     

   • Edit %ROLLER%/WEB-INF/security.xml file For the beans with ids "anonymousAuthenticationProvider" and "anonymousProcessingFilter" change the value field of the property with name="key" to any string value of your choosing. Use the same key value in these two beans; they must match.
     For the beans with ids "rememberMeServices" and "rememberMeAuthenticationProvider" change the value field of the property with name="key" to be different from the default value of "rollerlovesacegi". You can use any string value of your choosing. It should be a secret specific to your site. Use the same key value in these two beans. Again, they must match.

9. Start your Servlet Container and your database

   Start your Servlet Container, open your web browser, browse to the Roller start page and start using Roller.

       C> cd %CATALINA_HOME/%bin
       C> startup
   

Point your browser to the URL: http://localhost:8080/roller. You're all set!

Posted at 12:05PM May 18, 2007 by Manveen Kaur in Sun  |  Comments[0]