Chapter 2. Installation

Installing the Tomcat bundle
Startup
Shutdown
Startup scripts
Normal Mode
Developer mode
eXo Profiles

eXo Platform is packaged as a deployable enterprise archive, per the Java EE specification, and as a configuration directory.

The easiest way to install eXo Platform is to take the default bundle. This is a ready-made package on top of Tomcat 6 application server, so you simply need to copy the bin/tomcat6-bundle/ directory to your server.

eXo Platform leverages the application server on which it is deployed. This means, to start and stop eXo Platform, you only need to start and stop your application with the default commands.

The server has started when you see the following message in your log/console:

INFO: Server startup in 353590 ms

The server has stopped when you see the following message in your log/console:

INFO: Stopping Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080

eXo comes with several builtin startup scripts :

The normal mode starts with the following JVM options :

-Xms256m 
-Xmx1024m 
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m 
-Djava.security.auth.login.config=../conf/jaas.conf  
-Dexo.conf.dir.name=gatein/conf 
-Dexo.profiles=default
-Xms Minimal heap size (defaults to 256 MB)
-Xmx Maximal Heap Size of (defaults to 1 GB)
-Djava.security.auth.login.config path to the JAAS security file where the security domains are and JAAS authentication modules are declared
-Dexo.conf.dir.name path where eXo will start looking at configuration.properties and configuration.xml
-Dexo.profiles the list of comma-separated exo profiles to activate

This is enough to start and run a demo, but you will need to adjust these values for a production setup.

The developer mode scripts add a few more options.

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n 
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote 
-Dorg.exoplatform.container.configuration.debug 
-Dexo.product.developing=true 
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote activates the JMX remoting
-Xdebug Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n enables remote debugging
-Dorg.exoplatform.container.configuration.debug the container will log to the console what xml files it loads
-Dexo.product.developing=true desactivates javascript and css merging for easier debugging

By passing -Dexo.profiles=p1,p2,p3..., you can enable modules.

You can enable/disable select modules if they are not in use.

Additionally, you can use these profiles: