Installation Instructions

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to give a brief list of tasks (mainly software installation) you need to perform to set up the SUNIWE uPortal / Web Services system and to suggest an order for the tasks as we had problems with the order of tasks in the documentation on the uPortal web site.

Installation

The graphic below illustrates the components involved in the UPortal and Web Services interactions. At Staffordshire University we put all the components for the Web Services and UPortal onto a single server. The following instructions assume you will be doing the same. If not, just install software according to the diagram.

graphics1

Install Java JDK

Download JDK 5.0 from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp and install. Installation instructions are linked from the same page.

Set JAVA_HOME

Create an environment variable called JAVA_HOME and set it to the directory where you’ve installed the JDK.

      export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/jdk-1.2.2

Install Apache Ant

Download Ant from http://ant.apache.org/ and install.

Manual with installation instructions: http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html

Set ANT_HOME

Create an environment variable called ANT_HOME and set it to the directory where you’ve installed Ant.

Add the Ant bin directory to the PATH environment variable.

      export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/ant
    export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

Install Apache Tomcat

Use version 5.5.9 if possible. At the time of writing, later versions have a UPortal login bug which will be fixed in uPortal 2.5.2.

Download Tomcat from http://tomcat.apache.org/ and install.

Installation instructions:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/setup.html

Install Apache Axis

Download and install Axis (Java) from: http://ws.apache.org/axis/

Installation instructions:

http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/install.html

Install an SQL database

Use PostgreSQL or MySQL. We used PostgreSQL initially purely because we wanted to have a look at it, having already had some experience of MySQL. We later reverted to MySQL as more of the development team were familiar with it.

Install PostgreSQL

http://www.postgresql.org/

Installation instructions:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/installation.html

Install PostgreSQL 8.1.x according to the installation instructions.

Install the PostgreSQL JDBC driver

Download an appropriate JDBC JAR file from http://jdbc.postgresql.org/download.html. The JDBC driver file will vary with the PostgreSQL and JDK versions. Look up which JDBC file corresponds to your combination of PostgreSQL and JDK. In our case this was postgresql-8.1dev-402.jdbc3.jar.
Create a directory /usr/local/java to hold the external java libraries required by UPortal.
Copy postgresql-8.1dev-402.jdbc3.jar to /usr/local/java.
Copy postgresql-8.1dev-402.jdbc3.jar to jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9/common/lib.
Create a database called uportal with UTF8 encoding using the PostgreSQL pgAdminIII interface or from the command line using psql.

SQL

The SQL to create the database is:

      
CREATE DATABASE uportal
    WITH ENCODING='UTF8'
    OWNER=postgres;

This assumes your superuser for PostgreSQL is a use called postgres.

Install UPortal

Installation instructions: http://www.uportal.org/administrators/install_v2.html

Download UPortal

http://www.uportal.org/download.html

Download the quick-start and the UPortal-only distributions. The UPortal-only distribution will be installed and the quick-start distribution will be used to supply the external libraries that UPortal requires.

Install External Dependency Libraries

Extract uPortal_rel-2-5-1.

Copy the contents of the lib directory to /usr/local/java (not the lib directory itself, just the jar files in it).

Edit uPortal_rel-2-5-1\build.properties

Make the following changes to the build.properties file:

      
lib.path=/usr/local/java
    server.home=/usr/local/tomcat (your tomcat directory)
    jdbcDriver.jar=${lib.path}/postgresql-8.1dev-402.jdbc3.jar (your JDBC file)
    #webapp.contextFile=uPortal.xml 
    webapp.contextFile=uPortal55.xml

Edit uPortal_rel-2-5-1\ properties\Logger.properties

Make the portal log appear in the Tomcat logs directory:

      
log4j.appender.R.File= /usr/local/tomcat/logs/portal.log

Edit uPortal_rel-2-5-1\properties\rdbm.properties

      
jdbcDriver=org.postgresql.Driver
    jdbcUrl=jdbc:postgresql://localhost/uportal (substitute the name of your server and uportal database name)
    jdbcUser=postgres (your PostgreSQL user)
    jdbcPassword=pgsql (the PostgreSQL user’s password)

Edit C:\download\uPortal\uPortal_rel-2-5-1\properties\db\dbloader.xml

Add a type mapping for your JDBC driver. For our postgresql-8.1dev-402.jdbc3.jar it was the following:

      
<db-type-mapping>
    <db-name>PostgreSQL</db-name>
    <db-version>8.1.1</db-version>
    <driver-name>PostgreSQL Native Driver</driver-name>
    <driver-version>PostgreSQL 8.1devel JDBC3 with SSL (build 402)</driver-version> <type><generic>LONGVARCHAR</generic><local>TEXT</local></type> <type><generic>VARCHAR</generic><local>VARCHAR</local></type> <type><generic>LONGVARBINARY</generic><local>BYTEA<local></type> <type><generic>VARBINARY</generic><local>BYTEA</local></type> <type><generic>INTEGER</generic><local>integer</local></type>
    </db-type-mapping>

Build uportal

      
cd uPortal_rel-2-5-1
    ant initportal

If all goes well you should get the following message:

      
BUILD SUCCESSFUL

If not, deal with any errors and try again.

Stop and Start Tomcat

To get it to use the new jar library files.

Launch uPortal

http://<your server>:8080/uPortal (or whatever you’ve configured the URL to be).

You can login to uPortal using one of the following username/password combinations:

         demo/demo
       student/student
       staff/staff
       faculty/faculty
       developer/developer