eXo Platform comes with two sample portals that showcase the capabilities of the product. Before deploying your system in production, you will want to remove these sample apps.
The instructions below assume that you are using the hsqldb embedded database configuration.
Stop the server shutdown.sh
Delete acme-portal.war
Delete exo.ecms.ext.acme.config.jar
Delete gatein/data
Restart
Extensions are packaged as java EE web applications and come packaged as normal .war files. Hence, to deploy a custom extension, you will likely do as for any other webapp. In Tomcat this ends up by copying the war archive to the webapps folder
However, note that the Gatein extension mechanism imposes that the starter.war webapp starts after all extension wars. This is the case for the sample applications bundled by defaut, but you must ensure that for your custom applications. There are several ways to control le loading order of webapps in Tomcat. Please refer to Tomcat's Deployer How To
It may be necessary to use an HTTP server as a frontend for tomcat. For example, you may want to keep more then one application server on the same host, and/or you want to access these app servers with separate DNS names, without having to add a port to the URL. There are two methods that allow you to "glue" Apache HTTP Daemon and tomcat application server:
via HTTP protocol, using proxy module
via Apache JServ Protocol, using tomcat connector or HTTPD AJP proxy module
First, you need to configure a new virtual host in Apache HTTPD for the application server. This is the simplest example of a virtual host:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName Enter your server DNS name here
RedirectMatch permanent "^/?$" "/portal/"
</VirtualHost>
You can find more information about Apache HTTP daemon host here
With the glue method, it is necessary to configure Apache HTTP daemon to work as reverse proxy, which will redirect the client's requests to the app server's HTTP connector. For this type of connection, you will need to include the mod_proxy module in the HTTP demon configuratinon file. This can be found in the httpd.conf file, which is usually located here: /etc/httpd/conf/. However, depending on your OS, this path may vary. You will then need to add some directives to your virtual host configuration.
ProxyRequests Off ProxyPass "/" http://YOUR_AS_HOST:AS_HTTP_PORT/ ProxyPassReverse "/" http://YOUR_AS_HOST:AS_HTTP_PORT/
In the example above: YOURASHOST - host (IP or DNS name) is the location of your application server. If you run HTTP demon on the same host as your app server, you can change this to localhost. ASHTTPPORT - port, is the location where your app server will listen for incoming requests. For tomcat this value, by default, is 8080. You can find the value at tomcat/conf/server.xml
In this example, HTTP daemon will work in reverse proxy mode (ProxyRequests Off) and will redirect all requests to tcp port 8080 on localhost. So, the configuration of a virtual host will look like the following:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName Enter your server DNS name here
RedirectMatch permanent "^/?$" "/portal/"
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass "/" http://localhost:8080/
ProxyPassReverse "/" http://localhost:8080/
</VirtualHost>
For more detail about mod_proxy, review this documentation
As described above, the 'glue' method can be implemented in two ways:
using the native Apache HTTP demon's AJP proxy module
using the native Apache Tomcat's AJP conector
With the first method, you only need the HTTP demon and application server, but settings are limited. With the second method, you can obtain much richer settings, but you will need to download and install additional modules for HTTP Daemon that are not included in the default package.
Make sure that mod_proxy_ajp.so is included in the list of loadable modules. Add the following to your virtual host configuration setting:
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8009/
In this example, the app server is located on the same host as the Apache HTTP daemon, and accepts incoming connections on port 8009 (the default setting for tomcat application server). A full list of virtual host configurations can be found here:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName Enter your server DNS name here
RedirectMatch permanent "^/?$" "/portal/"
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8009/
</VirtualHost>
Download AJP connector module from here
Move the downloaded mod_jk.so file into HTTPD's module directory. For example: /etc/httpd/modules (this may be different, depending on the OS)
Create the configuration file for module modjk.conf
LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so
<IfModule jk_module>
# ---- Where to find workers.properties
JkWorkersFile conf.d/workers.properties
# ---- Where to put jk logs
JkLogFile logs/mod_jk.log
# ---- Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
JkLogLevel info
# ---- Select the timestamp log format
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %R %T"
# ---- Send everything for context /examples to worker named worker1 (ajp13)
JkMountFileReload "0"
</IfModule>
You can find more details in the Tomcat docs
Place the mod_jk.conf file into the directory where other configuration files for Apache HTTP Demon are located. For example, /etc/httpd/conf.d/
Create a workers.properties file, which defines AJP workers for HTTP demon.
worker.list=status, WORKER_NAME # Main status worker worker.stat.type=status worker.stat.read_only=true worker.stat.user=admin # Your AJP worker configuration worker.WORKER_NAME.type=ajp13 worker.WORKER_NAME.host=localhost worker.WORKER_NAME.port=8109 worker.WORKER_NAME.socket_timeout=120 worker.WORKER_NAME.socket_keepalive=true
In example above you can change WORKERNAME to any value.
Place this file in the same directory as the mod_jk.conf file.
Update the virtual host configuration:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName Enter your server DNS name here
RedirectMatch permanent "^/?$" "/portal/"
ProxyRequests Off
JkMount /* WORKER_NAME
</VirtualHost>