Installing the uPortal 3.1.0 M2 quickstart

Owned by Andrew Petro
Last updated: Mar 01, 2009Version comment
2 min read

Step 0: What you'll need to succeed

In order to succeed at installing, you'll need to be able to open .tar.gz files. (These are archive files like .zip files but without some of .zip's significant limitations). If your system can't yet open .tar.gz files, don't panic. Please ask for help.

In order to start uPortal once it's installed, you'll need to have already installed Java JDK 6 and have set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. If you don't have JDK6 installed and/or haven't set that environment variable, don't panic. Please ask for help.

Step 1: Expand the quickstart archive

Summary: Un-zip the uPortal-3.1.0-MC-quick-start-dev.tar.gz archive to a folder in the root directory of your disk named "up31seminar".

Details on how to do this:

First, you'll need to make a directory to install uPortal 3.1 quickstart into.

On Linux or Mac OS X:

cd /
mkdir up31seminar

or on Windows

cd C:
mkdir up3seminar

Then, you'll need to expand the archive into that directory. Most Linux distributions and Mac OS X have built-in support for this such that if you copy the uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start-dev.tar.gz file to the up31seminar directory and then double-click on it, it will be un-archived into the right location.

Step 2: Start uPortal (by starting HSQLDB and Tomcat)

Summary: Follow the directions in the README.txt to start uPortal.

Details on how to do this:

You'll now have the uPortal 3.1 M1 quickstart unzipped to

/up31seminar/uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start

or on Windows, to

C:\up31seminar\uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start

The quickstart comes with a handy README file which will be at 

/up31seminar/uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start/README.txt

Go ahead and open it and take a look.

Here's the short version of what it tells you to do to start uPortal:

On Linux or Mac OS X:

cd /up31seminar/uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start
./ant.sh start

On Windows: 

cd C:
cd up31seminar\uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start
ant.bat start

Step 3: Observe a started up uPortal

After you wait just a moment for the uPortal application to start, you can see it in your web browser at

http://localhost:8080/uPortal/

Step 4: Try it out

Explore your quickstarted uPortal instance. Try logging in as some of the provided users.

Step 5: Shut it down again

When you'd like to stop your uPortal application, Tomcat, and the in-memory HSQLdb database, you can execute a convenience Ant script to stop the system very much like that for starting it. You might stop uPortal in order to deploy changes to the code or just to reclaim some system resources.

On Linux or Mac OS X:

cd /up31seminar/uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start
./ant.sh stop

On Windows: 

cd C:
cd up31seminar\uPortal-3.1.0-M2-quick-start
ant.bat stop