The Portal Installer

If you are using Tomcat 5.0+ as your web container, then AstroGrid supplies an installer application. This is a self-executing jar file that prompts the user for any required configuration settings It also gives you the option to save your settings for reuse should you wish to reinstall the portal. Further information can be found on the software site.

If you are not using Tomcat, or you are using it, but are the sort of person who likes the challenge of working in the dark, on your knees, with a hand-tied behind your back, please follow the instructions below.

Deploying the whole portal the hard way

This link gives access to the latest war files. Take the astrogrid-portal-*.war and deploy it to Tomcat by your favourite method.

*NOTE* As of today (16/9/04) the portal must be deployed to a webapp named "astrogrid-portal". It is anticipated that this restriction will be removed soon. You may need to rename the war to "astrogrid-portal.war" to achieve this, depending on the deployment method you use.

Deploying selected portal pages the hard way

If you wish you can deploy only a subset of the portal pages.

• Deploy the astrogrid-portal-base.war to Tomcat in the usual way.
• Stop tomcat
• Then take each subcomponent astrogrid-portal-*.war in turn and unzip it over the top of the webapp's folder in Tomcat.
• Restart Tomcat

Configuration

If you deploy the portal by hand, you will need to configure it by hand too.

The login page configuration is handled using the org.astrogrid.config package. There are a number of different ways that the application can be configured (see the Config javadoc), but the simplest way to configure it is to enter the JNDI properties below into Tomcat's server.xml file using the Tomcat administrator tool.

• org.astrogrid.registry.query.endpoint=end point of the registry query webservice
• org.astrogrid.community.ident=Local community identifier (e.g. org.astrogrid.localhost)
• emailserver.address=address of your smtp server [127.0.0.1]
• emailserver.user=user whose account is used for sending reminder emails [astrogrid]
• emailserver.password=user's password (if necessary) []
• emailserver.from=return address for reminder emails [astrogrid@star.le.ac.uk]
• astrogrid.portal.admin.email=email address of the administrator who should receive reminder and registration emails from users[jdt@roe.ac.uk]
• workflow.jes.endpoint=end point of the Job Entry System's JobControllerService
• workflow.applist=registry (Instructs the portal to get the list of applications from the registry)

Prequisites

• JDK1.4 or above
• Maven
• The Maven javaapp plugin

Building

After checking out all the files, cd to the root portal directory and execute maven astrogrid-install-artifact to generate the war files. To generate the documentation execute maven astrogrid-build-site