Jetspeed 2 Installer

Getting Started with the Installer

With version 2.2.1+, there is now only one installer (previous releases had two installers). From the installation program, you can choose either the demo or minimal installation. The demo option is best for seeing more features, capabilities, and demo portlet applications. The minimal option could be useful for basing your own custom-portal distribution upon, or just seeing the basic feature set of Jetspeed.

  1. Minimal Installer Option - only contains a Jetspeed Portal and the Jetspeed Administrative Portlets, with a minimal Site map and set of users
  2. Full or Demo Option - contains a Jetspeed Portal, the Jetspeed Administrative Portlets, a full demo Site Map, 10 users. Additionally, there several portlet applications including an RSS application, a Database Browser application, a Web Content application, and a set of demo portlets including Google Maps, weather portlets, and lots of programming examples to get you started.

The installer contains both options, and can be downloaded here:



Jetspeed Installer

To run the installer: 

java -jar jetspeed-installer-2.3.1.jar

The installer is capable of running on headless (i.e. no gui) machines, and will detect so automatically.
To force the installer in text mode manually, pass in the text parameter: 

java -jar jetspeed-installer-2.3.1.jar text

After starting the installer and advancing through the splash and license pages, select the Install Jetspeed Portal installer operation and continue. The installer will then prompt for information required for the installation process. Documentation for the other installer operations used primarily for ETL migration can be found here: ETL Migration Guide.

Database Selection

The installer will ask you to choose a database for storing the Jetspeed database. We provide a default Derby database for demo systems. The Derby database runs in embedded mode inside the Jetspeed/Tomcat JVM. All other databases require additional configuration. If you selected Derby, you can go with the default parameters provided. For all other databases you must first create an area to hold the Jetspeed tables. For some databases this area is called a catalog, others call it a schema, while others call it a database. Consult your database documentation for details on how to create a catalog or schema to hold the Jetspeed tables. Additionally, you may need to create a database user to access the Jetspeed tables. Often it is required to grant access to the schemas (catalogs) for the given user.

Jetspeed supported database list:

  • DB2
  • Derby (default)
  • MS SQL
  • My SQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Oracle (9i or higher)
  • SapDB
  • Manual database setup

If you choose the manual database setup, then the database scripts will not be run and you will need to configure the database manually after the installation. All database scripts are provided in the installation under the database directory. For your specific database, look for the corresponding directory name. During installation, you will be prompted for the following fields after chosing your database types (except for Derby):

  • A username
  • A password
  • A JDBC connection string
  • A JDBC driver name
  • The location of a valid JDBC driver. The installer will copy this driver to the installed location in Tomcat.
The connections strings are only partially completed in the well-known format of the particular databaes. Please take care to complete the values in your connection string for your database. The driver name should be the right driver class for your database at the time of the making of this installation. Please ensure that a newer driver is not required for your database. Note also that the location of the JDBC driver must be selected. We have not provided the file system path to the jar file but only the likely file name. You may want to check and see if newer versions of the driver are available.

Once you have entered all of your parameters, the installer will test the database connection before proceeding. If the connection fails, please go back to the connection configuration setup and provide the correct parameters. If you choose to continue, the database scripts will not be run and you will need to configure the database manually after the installation. Once the installer verifies the database connection, you are ready to proceed with installation process.

Please take note of the location where you are installing on your file system.
Also, on a Windows platform make sure to use a location path without spaces, e.g. NOT under C:\Program Files.

Starting Jetspeed-2

Once you have completed a successful install, you are ready to start the Jetspeed Portal. On linux, here is an example where you have installed to the default location:
Note that the setting of CATALINA_OPTS is optional in the following examples. (See Note on Permanent Generation Size of Your JVM for detail.) 

$ cd ~/jetspeed-2.3.1/bin
$ export CATALINA_OPTS="-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"
$ ./startup.sh

On windows, here is an example where you have installed to the default location: 

> cd C:\Apache\Jetspeed-2.3.1\bin
> set CATALINA_OPTS="-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"
> startup.bat

The very first invocation of the portal requires anywhere from 10 seconds to 30 seconds for initial startup and final installation. After starting the server, start up a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/jetspeed/portal

Note on Permanent Generation Size of Your JVM

Note: You may need to increase the permanent generation size of your JVM when there are a lot of Servlets, JSP's or when script portlets are used, in order to avoid OutOfMemoryError errors. By default, it is 64MB. Increasing it to be -XX:MaxPermSize=128m might be a good start. Please see http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/Memory for detail.

Login to Jetspeed-2

All preconfigured users have the same password as username (for example the admin user has the password admin) If you installed with the Minimal option on installation, one test account are available: 

admin 	  -- System administrator, super user

If you installed with the Demo option upon installation, several additional test accounts are available: 

admin 	  -- System administrator, super user
debbie    -- example user with the developer role in the engineering group
manny     -- example user with the devmgr role in the engineering group, also demonstrates a delegated security manager, can manage users with the "dev" (developer) role, see home page of this user
bill      -- example user with the executive role in the finance and marketing groups
martha    -- example user with the marketing role in the marketing group

Changing the Database

After running the installation, you can manually reinitialize the database or even switch to another database. To do so, we provide an Ant script found under the database directory of your installed Jetspeed portal. The database configuration is defined in the database.properties file. To reinitialize or change the database, go to the database directory and edit the database.properties file, save it, and then run ant.

Here is a sample database configuration file: 

; Jetspeed Enterprise Portal 2.1 Database setup configuration
; db.type supported values: db2, derby, mssql, mysql, oracle, postgres, sapdb
db.type=mysql
: for db.type other than derby, the properties below need to be specified
db.username=j2
db.password=abracadabra
jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/prod-2
jdbc.driver.class=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

If you are configuring a database for the first time after choosing Manual database setup in the installer, or want to try out a different type of database, make sure to copy the specific JDBC driver for the database to the Tomcat shared/lib folder before running ant.
Note: for Derby, the needed driver is already placed there or available from the database/lib directory of your installed Jetspeed portal.