Installation of SVN

[slothrop]

I downloaded Subversion, MySQL v5.0, Ant 1.7, 2 copies of Tomcat 5.5 and used svn to download the sourcecode for Alfresco 2.1 into WIndows XP.  Following the wiki I was able to successfully build the code but I am unsure as to what to do next.

When I try to start the server using the alf_start.bat file in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer directory, it fails because there is no alfresco.bat file in C:\Alfresco.  There are copies of alfresco.bat in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\installjammer, C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\tomcat and C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\bitrock\bin but I doubt it would do any goood to just move one of these into C:\Alfresco.

I suspect that there is an entire installation or deployment step or steps that I have failed to do but I am not certain what exactly these might be.  I have read the README_mysql file and carried out the instructions but don't know what to do about the instructions in the README_war file.  I have 2 copies of alfresco.war, one in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\web-client\build\dist and another in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\3rd-party\distro\Tomcat 5.5\webapps.  But again I have been unable to figure out what to do with them.

[mikeh]

Hi,

You're ok to copy the Alfresco.bat from the tomcat subfolder.

Thanks,
Mike

[slothrop]

Thanks for responding Mike.

When I copied alfresco.bat from C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\tomcat to C:\Alfresco\ I got a message that said it couldn't find it in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer which suggests that I may have misreported the message in my initial post.  When I copied it to C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer it said it couldn't find RegPaths.exe and SetPaths.bat.  From reading alfresco.bat it looked like it was expecting these to be in the same directory.

At this point I that rather than moving files around one at a time I would go back to looking for a step that I failed to do after the build.  While reading README files at random I found one in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\deployment\build\dist that talked about unzipping the alfresco-deployment.zip file.

I unzipped the file and followed the rest of the instructions as best as I could but when I executed the deploy_start.bat file file it hung while binding the service 'deployment' to the RMI registry.  I tried this with the dep.rmi.port=44100 (default) and with dep.rmi.port=4100 in the deployment-properties file with identical results.

Any hints?
Robert

[mikeh]

The deployment server is a separate component to support WCM - it's not a path you need to go down.

RegPaths.exe is in projects\installer\bin-win


Thanks,
Mike

[slothrop]

Hi Mike,
So is it the case that I should be able to go from the ant build to starting the server?  It seems that the directory structure is all wrong.  I have a previous installation of Alfresco 2.1 with just the application and not the source code and it seems that it has a much different file structure.  For instance, the start and stop bat files and the alf_data subdirectory are under the parent directory (now called C:\Alfresco_old) while in the new installation they are in C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\tomcat.  The alf_data directory in the new installation has subdirectories while in the old it doesn't.

More to the point, if I copy RegPaths from the \installer\bin-win subdirectory to \installer so that it is in the same subdirectory as alf_start.bat it gets past the

   call RegPaths.exe
   call SetPaths.bat
   del SetPaths.bat

lines in alfresco.bat,  echos "Starting Tomcat…" and then echos "System cannot find the path specified" presumably because the next line is,

   call "%CATALINA_HOME%\bin\startup.bat"

where CATALINA_HOME is set at the top of the file by:

   set CATALINA_HOME=%ALF_HOME%tomcat

In this installation the C:\Alfresco\root\projects\installer\tomcat directory has no subdirectories and there is no start.bat file anywhere.  However, the C:\Alfresco\root\3rd-party\distro\Tomcat 5.5 does have a \bin subdirectory which contains the tomcat5.exe and tomcat5w.exe files, among others.  In the old installation the C:\Alfresco_old\tomcat directory has a \bin subdirectory which contains a startup.bat file along with the tomcat executables.

The batch files appear to be compatible with the old installation but not the new.  So is the procedure to keep doing alf_start.bat and moving files in response to errors?  Or would it be better to modify the batch files to reflect the directory structure?  Or is there a step in this that I have left out that would do some of this automatically?  Or do I need to remove the old Alfresco installation in order to have the ant build configure everything correctly?
Robert

[mikeh]

So is it the case that I should be able to go from the ant build to starting the server?  It seems that the directory structure is all wrong.  I have a previous installation of Alfresco 2.1 with just the application and not the source code and it seems that it has a much different file structure.

Yes, because this is how we work on a daily basis at Alfresco HQ. The key is to have the environment variable TOMCAT_HOME set correctly, e.g. TOMCAT_HOME=C:\alfresco\tomcat

Then "ant build-tomcat" will build the source and copy the .war to the correct folder. You may have to mess with the batch files, but generally if all the batch files, etc are in c:\alfresco with tomcat as a direct subfolder, you should be ok. I believe this is then similar to the installation output?

Note that source code can be on a separate structure altogether - in fact mine is on a separate virtual drive.

Does that help?
Mike

[slothrop]

Yes, this does clarify things a bit.  What I am finding is that some necessary batch files are not there.  There is no startup.bat, no catalina.bat, no setclasspath.bat.  I can copy these from my old installation, (now under C:\Alfresco_old\…) but I'm thinking that the absence of these is a symptom of something else that has gone wrong.  Are these supposed to come from the download or are they supposed to be generated by the ant build?