Prerequisites

  • JDK1.4 or above
  • A suitable web container. Astrogrid was developed using Tomcat. A Tomcat version 5.0+ is the recommendation.

Related components

A fully functioning portal depends on all components within Astrogrid being deployed. These components do not have to be colocated with the portal. It is indeed likely that over time there will be multiple deployments of each component.

  • Registry
  • Community
  • JES - the Job Execution System, which manages workflows at execution time.
  • CEA - the Common Execution Architecture, which mediates between Astrogrid and astronomical applications, including data collections.
  • PAL - the Publishers Astrogrid Library. Coloqually an instance of PAL could be thought of as a datacenter.
  • The MySpace virtual file system. Two components are involved here: File Manager and File Store.
The portal will function provided it is configured to point to its local community, a registry against which it can make queries, and a JES against which it can submit workflows for execution. Any further details that are required regarding applications, data collections and MySpace are gained from having access to the registry.

Installation

The Portal Installer

If you are using Tomcat 5.0+ as your web container, then AstroGrid supplies an installer application. This is a self-extracting jar file that will manage required downloads, prompt the user for any required configuration settings It also gives you the option to save settings for reuse should you wish to reinstall the portal. Further information can be found on the software site. Having downloaded the installer, execute it by running from the directory that contains the installer:

java -jar [installer's jar file name]

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-1.1-000*.war and deploy it to Tomcat by your favourite method.

*NOTE* As of release 1.1 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)
If values are not given for these properties, the defaults in square brackets are used instead.

Building the Portal

Prequisites

  • JDK1.4 or above
  • Maven
  • The Maven javaapp plugin
To install the javaapp plugin type:

maven -Dmaven.repo.remote=http://www.ibiblio.org/maven,http://maven-plugins.sf.net/maven -DartifactId=maven-javaapp-plugin -DgroupId=maven-plugins -Dversion=1.3 plugin:download

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