Installation and Administration

Deploying Nuxeo on CloudFoundry

Updated: October 16, 2020

Enabling Tomcat 7

Nuxeo is currently packaged with a Tomcat 6 instance. The following allows it to work in a Tomcat 7 instance.

  1. First get a Tomcat 7 instance and unzip it into /opt/tomcat-7.0.30

    cd /opt
    unzip apache-tomcat-7.0.30.zip
    mv apache-tomcat-7.0.30 tomcat-7.0.30
    
  2. Then convert Nuxeo to work in that Tomcat 7 instance:

    cd /opt
    unzip nuxeo-coreserver-5.7-I20121123_0116-tomcat.zip
    T6=nuxeo-coreserver-5.7-I20121123_0116-tomcat
    T7=tomcat-7.0.30
    rm -rf $T7/nxserver
    rm -rf $T7/templates
    rm -rf $T7/endorsed
    cp -R $T6/nxserver $T7/
    cp -R $T6/templates $T7/
    cp -R $T6/endorsed $T7/
    cp $T6/bin/nuxeoctl $T7/bin/
    cp $T6/bin/nuxeo.conf $T7/bin/
    cp $T6/bin/nuxeo-launcher.jar $T7/bin/
    cp $T6/lib/log4j.xml $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/nuxeo-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/commons-logging-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/commons-lang-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/freemarker-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/log4j-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/lucene-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/lib/mail-*.jar $T7/lib/
    cp $T6/templates/tomcat7/conf/server.xml.nxftl $T7/templates/common-base/conf/server.xml.nxftl
    chmod +x $T7/bin/*.sh
    
  3. In bin/nuxeo.conf , remove or comment nuxeo.wizard.done=false.

Building the Tomcat+WAR

This builds a ZIP containing a WAR and a few additional files, designed to be unpacked at the root of a Tomcat instance. It cannot be used directly as a pure WAR.

cd /opt/tomcat-7.0.30
bin/nuxeoctl pack /opt/nuxeotomcatwar.zip 

The resulting ZIP is all that's needed for the rest of the instructions.

Preparing a full Tomcat 7 with Nuxeo WAR

  1. Set up a new Tomcat 7 from scratch with the WAR that was just built.

    cd /opt
    rm -rf tomcat-7.0.30
    unzip apache-tomcat-7.0.30.zip
    mv apache-tomcat-7.0.30 tomcat-7.0.30
    cd tomcat-7.0.30
    chmod +x bin/*.sh
    unzip /opt/nuxeotomcatwar.zip
    
  2. Now update the WAR to work in a Tomcat 7 instance without references to the toplevel >lib/ directory:

    mv lib/commons-*.jar lib/h2-*.jar lib/lucene-*.jar lib/nuxeo-*.jar webapps/nuxeo/WEB-INF/lib/
    rm lib/derby-*.jar
    
  3. Finally we must set up the Nuxeo datasources inside the WAR (instead of from the toplevel server.xml in a standard Nuxeo setup, which is more convenient when possible).

    Edit the file webapps/nuxeo/META-INF/context.xml. In this file the <Resource> elements that point to a global configuration in server.xml must be replaced by explicit resources:

      <Resource name="jdbc/NuxeoDS" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxsqldirectory" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxrelations-default-jena" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/comment-relations" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxaudit-logs" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxjbpm" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/placeful_service_ds" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxwebwidgets" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
      <Resource name="jdbc/nxuidsequencer" accessToUnderlyingConnectionAllowed="true" auth="Container" driverClassName="org.h2.Driver" maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000" password="" type="javax.sql.DataSource" url="jdbc:h2:nuxeo" username="sa" validationQuery=""/>
    

    In the above we use an embedded H2 database. Configuration for an external database server would need to use a different JDBC URL.

  4. The above exploded WAR can now be packed into a zipped WAR:

    cd /opt/tomcat-7.0.30/webapps/nuxeo
    zip -r /opt/nuxeo.war .
    

    The resulting /opt/nuxeo.war is now compatible with any modern application server.

Deploying to CloudFoundry

Patching the WAR

If you try to deploy the above WAR on CloudFoundry you'll get an error: Too many open files

This is due to the fact that CloudFoundry has a limit of 256 file descriptors open, and Nuxeo uses more.

In fact, it's the Tomcat classloader that uses a lot of file descriptors, because for performance reasons it keeps one open file descriptor per JAR in the WEB-INF/lib directory. To work around this problem, the non-Nuxeo JARs present in WEB-INF/lib can be merged into one big JAR, which solves the problem.

cd webapps/nuxeo/WEB-INF/lib
mkdir tmp
mkdir bigjar
mv *.jar tmp/
mv tmp/nuxeo-*.jar .
cd bigjar
for i in ../tmp/*.jar; do unzip $i; done
rm META-INF/*.SF META-INF/*.DSA
zip -r ../bigjar.jar .
cd ..
rm -rf tmp/ bigjar/

Deploying Tomcat 7 + Nuxeo

Before the above Tomcat 7 instance can be set up as a full “standalone” application in CloudFoundry, it needs to be modified to take configuration information (like TCP ports) from the CloudFoundry PaaS framework. (These are standard instructions for using a stock Tomcat in CloudFoundry, you'll find them elsewhere.)

  1. The following is added to bin/catalina.sh :

    # USE VCAP PORT IF IT EXISTS, OTHERWISE DEFAULT TO 8080
    if [ -z ${VCAP_APP_PORT} ]; then
      export VCAP_APP_PORT=8080
    fi
    export JAVA_OPTS="-Dport.http.nonssl=$VCAP_APP_PORT $JAVA_OPTS"
    
  2. The bin/startup.sh is changed to not run in the background ( run instead of start ):

    exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" run "$@"
    
  3. Finally the non-useful ports in conf/server.xml are commented out:

    • Replace 8005 with -1 to deactivate the Tomcat SHUTDOWN port,

    • Comment out the AJP connector on port 8009,

    • Replace 8080 with the expression ${port.http.nonssl} to use the PaaS configuration.

  4. The Tomcat 7 application including the Nuxeo WAR is now ready to be pushed to CloudFoundry as a “Standalone Application”. For this, standard CloudFoundry mechanisms are used, don't forget to specify the Java 7 runtime:

    vmc push --runtime=java7 myapp
    

    The following CloudFoundry YML manifest corresponds to a full setup ( myapp should be replaced by your namespace):

    ---
    applications:
      .:
        mem: 1G
        instances: 1
        url: myapp.cloudfoundry.com
        framework:
          info:
            mem: 64M
            exec:
            description: Standalone Application
          name: standalone
        command: bin/startup.sh
        name: myapp
        runtime: java7
    

Testing Nuxeo CMIS

Once deployed and started, Nuxeo CoreServer does not provide a web-accessible graphical user interface (because the CoreServer version doesn't have those), but it can be addressed through a CMIS client like the Apache CMIS Workbench available at http://chemistry.apache.org/java/developing/tools/dev-tools-workbench.html .

It must point to Nuxeo, whose CMIS address is described by the Nuxeo startup page, usually it is of the form http://NUXEO_SERVER/nuxeo/atom/cmis. The default Nuxeo user/password is Administrator/Administrator.