Basic Setup Help

[davewhit]

I was hoping to get some help in getting started building Alfresco and creating a .war file I can deploy to my JBoss installation.

For instance, there are a number of different projects in the source distribution, but I'm only interested in altering the UI to my needs so I assume the web-client is where I want to work. I expect I need to rebuild all of the projects to get a workable war though. However, it seems the project-build.xml files for each project treat each project as distinct rather than as part of the Alfresco.war.

Also, Eclipse is unhappy with nearly all of the build targets in the project-build.xml files.

It's these kinds of fundamentals I could sure use help with. If anybody could point out a resource I could refer to to get started I would be very grateful.

Also, I've checked the forum for information, but most of the stuff there is past the stage I'm currently working in. I've checked the Wiki and the page that seems perfect - "Basic Concepts" - says that the contents have been lost to spam.

thanks,
dave

[gavinc]

Hi Dave,

Yes, you're right each individual project has a build script which can be used to create the artifacts for the project. However, to build the overall WAR file you should use build.xml in the common folder i.e. /<alfresco>/common/build.xml.

There are four main targets in this file of use. "build-tomcat" (the default), "incremental-tomcat", "build-jboss" and "incremental-jboss".

The build-* targets delete all the classes and generated JARs etc. before building whereas the incremental-* targets don't!

Set up the environment variables required, this page on the wiki should help, and run one of the targets above, in your case probably "build-jboss". This should build the WAR, deploy it to your JBoss installation and copy all the config files.

If you are trying to deploy into your own JBoss (as opposed to the one bundled with Alfresco) then the instructions in this post will be useful.

As for the Eclipse problem, did you import the projects individually or did you import from the root level? As an FYI, you should import them individually.

Hope this helps, let us know if you have any more questions.

[davewhit]

I was trying to do my projects at the root level - not a good idea. Thanks for your advice, it was very helpful.

Now I have a different problem, but I'll submit that in a new thread…

thanks,
dave