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.
It’s worth noting that the only reason you could use port 8080 to access honeycomb is because you are on localhost, from any other host that port will be blocked. We’ve mapped port 443 using apache reverse proxy and that is the recommended way to access for now. I may include a ‘dev’ mode in future releases which does not enable the reverse proxy and just gives an unsecured install.
Thank you for the clarification, Martin… and thank you for the work on the Honeycomb Edition too. 😉
In LXC Ubuntu 14.04 error:
Notice: Preparing to install into /root/puppet-alfresco/modules …
Notice: Downloading from https://forge.puppetlabs.com …
Notice: Installing — do not interrupt …
/root/puppet-alfresco/modules
└── puppetlabs-vcsrepo (v1.3.1)
Error: Could not run: Could not retrieve facts for ubuntu-64: Invalid argument – /proc/cpuinfo
How to fix the error?
Wooow, that’s awesome, thanks for the informations, I’ll try it soon.
There is a file in /etc/init.d, iptables that controls the firewall. It blocks 8080.
In the /etc/init.d directory there is a file called iptables that controls the firewall. By default it blocks 8080, but you can comment out that line.
Thank you for sharing the hint, Mark.
Installed it, hooked it up to AD via LDAP, now I’m wondering what to do next with it…
It depends on what is your need… 🙂
First, you can store your vacation photos there. Every home needs a CMS, they just don’t know it.
Second, using CMIS you can use it as a database. You might need to create some custom document types.