Some proposals to enhance the ZIP file deployment documentation.

akreienbring1 — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:03:20 GMT

I'm referring to the official documentation here:

My Setup, according to the

JAVA OpenJDK 11.0.13.8
MySQL 8.0.27
MySQL Connector/J 8.0.27
ActiveMQ 5.16.1
Tomcat 9.0.65
Alfresco Content Services 7.2.0.1
Alfresco Search Services (Solr) 2.0.3.6

If I knew how to contribute to the documentation I would have done so, but I didn't find anything on Github, so I post it here to help others, who may run into the same quirks as I did.

Proposal 1 (DB Setup):

Please add sections regarding the supported DB setups for ACS. There's only an example regarding PostgreSQL. But for MySQL 8 a specific section of the documentation could mention:

That the initial root password is written into a [computername],err file (in the MySQL data folder) after the first initialisation of the DB.

And it would also be helpful to document the creation of the alfreso DB and an user like:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE alfresco CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
mysql> create user 'alfresco'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'alfresco';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON alfresco . * TO 'alfresco'@'localhost';

While this may be knowledge that any "Install without container" person should have, it would be VERY helpful to have a "alfresco-global.propeties.sample" in the distribution that mentions the correct driver name for MySQL 8 Connector/J.

The sample contains

#
# MySQL connection
#
#db.driver=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver

But the class name for the MySQL 8 Connector/J is com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver

Proposal 2 (Tomcat location):

Alfresco Docs - Install Alfresco Module Package

should mention that if your Tomcat installation is NOT located under the Alfresco distribution installation the line in "apply_amps.bat"

set CATALINA_HOME=%ALF_HOME%tomcat

has to be adjusted accordingly.

Proposal 3 (Enable Simple JAR modules😞

The creation of the modules folder under CATALINA_HOME is described as optional in the documentation. But at least for me the deployment failed because of the share and platform deployment XML descriptors that mention these folder.

Moreover: On my Windows OS the path in the XML files was not working until I changed the it to a windows path notation style.

Proposal 4 (Solr Metadata Keystore😞

Sorry, but this is really something that has to be fixed and enhanced in the Search Services distribution and it's :

Search Services 2.0 documentation

The location of the distributed keystore files is wrong. Should be now:

dir.keystore=${dir.root}/keystore/metadata-keystore

And

alfresco.secureComms=none

is not supported anymore. So either one has to configure "https" or "secret".

In the case of secret, which is the easier way for non production test systems, I had to add

alfresco.secureComms.secret=password

to all of the followong files

...\alfresco-search-services\solrhome\alfresco\conf\solrcore.properties
...\alfresco-search-services\solrhome\archive\conf\solrcore.properties
...\alfresco-search-services\solrhome\templates\noRerank\conf\solrcore.properties
...\alfresco-search-services\solrhome\templates\rerank\conf\solrcore.properties

AND I had to pass some JAVA Options, which can be done best in setenv.bat in the Tomcat bin folder.

set "CATALINA_OPTS=%CATALINA_OPTS%  -Dencryption.keystore.type=JCEKS -Dencryption.cipherAlgorithm=DESede/CBC/PKCS5Padding -Dencryption.keyAlgorithm=DESede -Dencryption.keystore.location=C:/OpenSource/Alfresco-7.2.0.1/alf_data/keystore/metadata-keystore/keystore -Dmetadata-keystore.password=KEYSTOREPW -Dmetadata-keystore.aliases=metadata -Dmetadata-keystore.metadata.password=KEYSTOREMETADATAPW -Dmetadata-keystore.metadata.algorithm=DESede

The values of the passwords can be found in the file "keystore-passwords.properties" under the mentioned metadata-keystore folder.

That's it for now. I may have overlooked some information during the install process, but I think some of this should find its way in the official documentation.

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Some proposals to enhance the ZIP file deployment documentation.