05 Exercise - Add a user via the md5passwd tool

Exercise

This page is a different kind of uPortal manual page, a hands-on exercise. It may be helpful to you to use this exercise in the context of this manual. It also may serve as a template for building uPortal training materials.

Purpose of this exercise

This exercise adds a new user to uPortal's internal set of locally managed login credentials.

This exercise helps introduce uPortal's command line tooling implemented via Ant and Maven and exercises this tooling to ensure it is properly configured..

Pre-requisites for this exercise

A working, installed, suitable instance of uPortal 3 (e.g., that provided by the uPortal Quickstart distribution)

Stepwise instructions

Step 1: Navigate to the uPortal 3 directory

Supposing you've unzipped the Quickstart into /up3 : Rather than running Ant in the /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/ directory, run it in /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/uPortal-3.0.0 , so that instead of running Ant on the build.xml at /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/build.xml, run Ant on the build.xml at /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/uPortal-3.0.0/build.xml .

Moving into the uPortal 3 directory

cd /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/uPortal-3.0.0

Step 2: Run the Ant tool on the build.xml in the uPortal 3 directory

As an example, ask Ant to enumerate the targets it can run in this context. The -p flag enumerates the targets available for the in-context project.

Running Ant to enumerate targets in the context

/uP3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin/ant -p

Example run

          
andrew-petros-macbook:~ apetro$ cd /up3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/uPortal-3.0.0/
andrew-petros-macbook:uPortal-3.0.0 apetro$ ../ant.sh -p
Buildfile: build.xml

Main targets:

 addstylesheet      Registers a new theme or structure
 clean              Removes the deployed uPortal from the container and runs 'mvn clean'
 clean-shared       Removes the ALL shared libraries from the container.
 crn-delete         Deletes the specified entity
 crn-export         Exports the specified entity or entities to XML on the file system
 crn-import         Imports the specified XML file or files
 crn-make-data-xml  Runs the DbUnload tool against all tables listed in data.xml
 db                 Loads database tables and data
 db-hibernate       Drops then creates Hibernate managed tables
 dbtest             Displays information about the database defined in rdbm.properties
 dbunload           Dumps a database table to a flat file in XML format
 delstylesheet      Deletes an existing theme or structure
 deluser            Delete traces of a user from the portal database
 deploy-ear         Deploy uPortal and dependent libraries and portlets to the servlet container
 deploy-war         Deploy the uPortal web application to the servlet container
 deployPortletApp   Deploys a portlet application
 help               Prints information about using this ant build file.
 hsql               Start a HSQLDB instance consistent with the default RDBMS requirements of uPortal
 hsql-shutdown      Compacts then cleanly shuts down hsql, useful if the 'hsql' task was run with '-Dspawn=true'
 i18n-db            Loads internationalization tables and data
 initportal         Runs all the targets necessary to deploy the portal and prepare the portal database
 l10n-db            Loads localized data
 md5passwd          Creates a user in the UP_PERSON_DIR table
 modstylesheet      Modifies an existing theme or structure
 regchantype        Registers a new channel type
Default target: help

Step 3: Try it out

Add a new user named "seminar" with password "howdy."

This user appears in other exercises

It is important for subsequent exercises that this user not have a password equal to its name, so don't set the password to "seminar".

Invoking md5passwd to create a new user

/uP3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin/ant md5passwd -Dusername=seminar

Notice that the Ant target is named "md5passwd". It is so named because what it is doing is creating an md5-hashed password entry in uPortal's internal user account table.

It takes a single parameter (that's defined with the -D) of "username", here set to value "seminar", since "seminar" will be the name of this example user.

It will run for a bit and then prompt you for the password for this new user. Here's an example run:

Example run to the point where it prompts for the password

andrew-petros-macbook:uPortal-3.0.0 apetro$ /uP3/uPortal-3.0.0-quick-start/apache-ant-1.6.5/bin/ant md5passwd -Dusername=seminar
Buildfile: build.xml

md5passwd:

     [echo] Invoking Md5Passwd
     [java] Working directory ignored when same JVM is used.
     [java] Enter Password for seminar:

Here it's waiting for the password. Type the desired password, press enter, and it will continue:

Completion of the user account creation run

howdy
     [java] Password Updated...

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 44 seconds
andrew-petros-macbook:uPortal-3.0.0 apetro$

Step 4: Try logging in as the created user

Visit your uPortal and attempt to login as seminar / howdy .