SSP- uPortal Deployment Instructions

Owned by Jason Elwood
Jan 11, 2013
2 min read

README for basic uPortal deployment

For further help please refer to the uPortal home page http://www.uportal.org or
the uPortal Confluence site http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPC/Home


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| Requirements                                                                 |
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JDK 1.6.0_26 or later - Just a JRE is not sufficient, a full JDK is required
Servlet 2.5 Container - Tomcat 6.0 is recommended, there some configuration
    changes that must be made for Tomcat 6.0 which are documented in the uPortal
    manual. https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40/Installing+Tomcat
Maven 2.2.1 or later
Ant 1.8.2 or later
    
    
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| Building and Deploying                                                       |
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uPortal uses Maven for its project configuration and build system. An Ant
build.xml is also provided which handles the initialization and deployment
related tasks. As a uPortal deployer you will likely only ever need to use the
Ant tasks. Ant 1.8.2 or later is required

Ant tasks (run "ant -p" for a full list) :
    hsql - Starts a HSQL database instance. The default uPortal configuration
        points to this database and it can be used for portal development.

    initportal - Runs the 'deploy-ear' and 'init-db' ant targets, should be the
        first and only task run when setting up a new uPortal instance
        WARNING: This runs 'init-db' which DROPS and re-creates the uPortal
        database
    
    deploy-ear - Ensures the latest changes have been compiled and packaged then
        deploys uPortal, shared libraries and all packaged portlets to the
        container
   
    initdb - Sets up the uPortal database. DROPS ALL EXISTING uPortal tables
        re-creates them and populates them with the default uPortal data
        WARNING: This DROPS and re-creates the uPortal database
    
    deploy-war - Ensures the latest uPortal changes have been compiled and
        packaged then deploys the uPortal WAR to the container.
    
    deployPortletApp - Deploys the specified portlet application to the
        container. This is the required process to deploy any portlet to a
        uPortal instance.
        ex: ant deployPortletApp -DportletApp=/path/to/portlet.war
    
    
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| Help and Support                                                             |
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The uportal-user@lists.ja-sig.org email address is the best place to go with
questions related to configuring or deploying uPortal. Information about joining
the list is available on the JA-SIG wiki:
    https://wiki.jasig.org/display/JSG/uportal-user

The uPortal manual is a collaborative document on the wiki which has
more detailed documentation: https://wiki.jasig.org/display/UPM40

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| Other Notes                                                                  |
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Initial Configuration
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To deploy uPortal you must set the server.home variable in the
build.properties file to the instance of Tomcat you want to deploy to.


Build approach
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The approach here is that there is a generic pom.xml and build.xml that you
should not have to edit, alongside a build.properties that you absolutely must
edit to reflect your local configuration. Edit build.properties to reflect such
configuration as where your Tomcat is, what context you would like uPortal to
be deployed as, etc.


Initial Deployment
----------------------------------------
You must run the initportal target before uPortal is started the first time.
This target will take care of compiling, deploying, database population and
other initial tasks. Running initportal again is similiar to hitting a reset
button on the portal. Any saved configuration in the portal is lost and a clean
version of the portal is configured.

Logging
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The /uportal-war/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/log4j.properties Log4j configuration
file will end up on the classpath for Commons Logging / log4j to find. You'll
need to either change that configuration then run deploy-war. You can configure
the logging level, where the file should be, or even choose a different logging
approach (log via XML to a ChainSaw instance, say).

Database configuration
--------------------------------------
Database configuration is configured in /uportal-war/src/main/resources/properties/rdbm.properties.