Run Alfresco Honeycomb Edition for the first time

Probably you already know or probably not, in any case Alfresco Community has a relevant new emerging organization called the Order Of The Bee. One of the goal of the OOTB is to maintain the so called Alfresco Honeycomb Edition, a free and open source distribution of Alfresco, mainly based on the Alfresco Community Edition.

In this post I would like to share my experience on the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition with an initial tutorial on how to set up the working environment and run it for the first time. Of course I would like to thank Martin Cosgrave and Daren Firminger for their work and support to me and the entire community too.

The puppet-alfresco project

The Alfresco Honeycomb Edition is released as a Puppet project you can find in the GitHub repository below.

https://github.com/marsbard/puppet-alfresco

This tutorial is based on the version 1.0.0 and the Alfresco 5.0 version.

Setting up the server

The first task is to define the server where the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition is going to run. In this case I prefer to start from a vanilla installation of Ubuntu O.S. 14.04.2 LTS. Let’s update the libraries and configurations.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get purge openjdk-*

Installing Java 8

After the empty server is up and running, the next task is to install the Java Development Kit. In this case I choose the JDK version 8. During the past weeks I used this tutorial and found it very interesting. In this post I use the same solution executing the commands listed below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

During the installation process, some easy questions about licenses and agreements will appear. Don’t worry about the answer and accept them. At the end, only if you have another Java installation in your environment, you can execute the command below.

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-8-oracle

After the installation with success, let’s check for the right java version.

ootb@ootbjava:~$ java -version 
java version "1.8.0_31" 
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_31-b13) 
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.31-b07, mixed mode)

Installing Git

One of the few prerequisites of the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition is Git. With apt-get command this is very easy to do.

sudo apt-get install git

If you don’t want to use Eclipse, please follow the instructions described into the project’s page otherwise you can use this tutorial below.

Installing Ecplise (optional)

Working with Eclipse on a DevOp project is not mandatory, but I prefer to do it. From this link you can download the Eclipse Mars. Unzip the file you download in the Desktop and run it using the commands below.

cd
cd Desktop/eclipse
./eclipse

Once Eclipse is up an running, access to the item Window -> Perspective -> Open Perspective -> Other.

Then select Git. Once a new dashboard will appear, click on ‘Clone a Git Repository’ and fill it in the way you can see below.

Select Next three times and the new repository is imported into your local environment. To use the project (and modify it, this is the purpose) right click on the puppet-alfresco item and select Import projects. A new window appears and fill it in the way you see below.

Click on Next and Finish and your copy of the puppet-alfresco project is into your computer.

Installing Alfresco

Now that your copy of the puppet project is into your server, it’s time to install the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition with the simple command list you can see below.

cd
cd git/puppet-alfresco
sudo ./install.sh

Now you can see an easy installer requesting for some few parameters you can decide to change.

Remember to define the domain parameter (I set the value localhost) and press I to go proceed to the installation. After few minutes (yes, the process is going to download several packages from the web) your process will end with a message and that’s all!

Starting and using Alfresco

Ok, now that you installed Alfresco with success, how to start it and use it?

Nothing easier: the puppet process installed and started Alfresco for you, so you can see your Alfresco up and running executing the command below.

tailf /opt/alfresco/tomcat/logs/catalina.out

To use your Alfresco Honeycomb Edition, open your browser and access to http://localhost:8080/share. The login and the password (if not previously changed) are admin. Below the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition with the OOTB theme.

(please note that the theme is not selected by default but available in the admin tools)

Conclusion

In this post I share my experience on the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition with an initial tutorial on how to set up the working environment and run it for the first time. This is a very first step to make the Alfresco Honeycomb Edition properly work. But the distribution is young and we all have to understand the details… with the help of the community.