Building & Deploying uPortal

Building and Deploying Instructions for:

uPortal Full-Source Version
uPortal Quick-Start

uPortal Full-Source Version Instructions

After you have downloaded uPortal let's start building your uPortal instance by going to your uPortal source directory.

Step 1: Configure the build.properties file

The uPortal build requires a build.properties file describing the deployment environment to be available in the root of the uPortal project.

1. Create the build.properties file by copying the build.properties.sample file to build.properties

cp build.properties.sample build.properties

2. Open the build.properties for editing and configure the "server.home" property to point to the root directory of your Tomcat installation.

##### Replace server.home with the location of Tomcat 6 on your machine #####
# path to tomcat binaries
server.home=/path/to/tomcat

The build file contains several other optional properties which may be configured to change the default server base and webapps directory or to re-configure Maven's home directory. Deployers may also use this file to modify defaults such as deletion of existing deployed resources.

Step 2: Configure your database.

Before deploying your uPortal instance to Tomcat we need to setup and configure the JDBC properties in the rdbm.properties file.

For database-specific instructions find your selected database and follow the steps:

Step 3: Tomcat Reminder

Just in case you missed it, don't forget to do the following configuration in your Tomcat installation

Shared Libraries
- uPortal places libraries in CATALINA_BASE/shared/lib The default Tomcat 6.0 download does not enable libraries to be loaded from this directory. To resolve this you must edit CATALINA_BASE/conf/catalina.properties and change the line that begins "shared.loader=" to the following:

Enabling shared libraries in CATALINA_BASE/conf/catalina.properties

shared.loader=${catalina.base}/shared/classes,${catalina.base}/shared/lib/*.jar

Shared Sessions
- Jasig portlets, as well as many other popular JSR-168 portlets, rely on the ability to share user session data between the portal web application and portlet applications. To enable this feature in Tomcat, you must add the emptySessionPath="true" parameter to the in-use connector.

Example Tomcat Connector Configuration

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" emptySessionPath="true"/>

Step 4: Deploy uPortal

WARNING: Running the following command will reinitialize your database by dropping all tables first. Your content will be lost if you run against an existing database.

Run the following command to deploy uPortal and load your database

ant initportal

Step 5: Restart Tomcat

$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh
$TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh

Step 6: Access uPortal

http://localhost:8080/uPortal/

Replace localhost:8080 with your configured server path

If everything has been installed correctly you should see the out-of-the-box uPortal screen below

uPortal Quick-Start Instructions

Step 1: Untar the package

After downloading the uPortal quickstart version untar the package as follows

tar -xvf uPortal-3.2.1-quick-start.tar.gz

Step 2: Set up JAVA_HOME

Make sure the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set

 export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/java

Step 3: Startup uPortal

Start uPortal by running the ant command from inside the uPortal-3.2.1-quick-start directory

ant start

Step 4: Access uPortal

http://localhost:8080/uPortal/