There are some areas that Plone really does well such as the content type handling and content workflow. But lack of documentation in other areas has left me pulling my hair out at times, such as ldap user and group integration with openldap and active directory, debugging modules and some new gotcha each time something is updated in a buildout.

Liferay has also had a steep learning curve, but I found it no where as bad as Plone. No messing in the ZMI for setting up ldap auth, changing database backends or setting portal defaults. Just one config file. I have found the speed surprising compared to Plone on the same hardware too. With java webapps I have tried in the past I have been left with the impression of them being bloated, memory hungry and slow. But I am slowly coming around thanks to Alfresco and Liferay.

It took a long time to get the liferay-portal-5.2.2.war running in the ubuntu jaunty tomcat6 environment and it still had a couple of issues so I just went back to running the liferay-timcat6 bundle which does run well without issue. I guess that is the price I pay for avoiding java for so long.

To make it suitable for my needs the interface needed to be cleaned up and I decided to just create a fresh theme which can be seen in the screenshot below. The theme is called Winter Sky and is adapted from MMOZINE, and is available from the Liferay community plugin section.

Other additions over the classic liferay theme are multiple level navigation menus and print styling css targets. Which were just a couple of extras that made things much more usable for my victims…. oh.. target users.

There are still a few visual glitches to fix, but everything seems usable and I will post the link to the Liferay project page once it is approved.

My goal was to install Alfresco in Ubuntu-8.10 and store the Alfresco install and config in git excluding the application data in such a way that I am able to checkout my Alfresco git repo on a new Ubuntu install and have Alfresco running immediately.

This turned out to be fairly easy and makes testing new configuration changes very simple.

There is plenty of information on configuring Alfresco on the Alfresco wiki, and most of my setup is based on the install tutorial for Ubuntu-8.04. So I will only cover the differences in the way I setup Alfresco.

Alfresco dependencies in Ubuntu

I chose to use puppet for taking care of dependencies as it is already in deployment for all the servers I use. The other common way of taking way of taking care of dependencies is to create a script that installs the dependencies and store it in the root Alfresco dir managed by git. If you do not want to setup puppet then see the initialize.sh file below. My puppet rule as follows also installs lighttpd and phpmyadmin.

class alfresco_base {
        package { [
                imagemagick,
                lighttpd,
                mysql-server,
                'openoffice.org-headless',
                php5-cgi,
                swftools]:
                        ensure => installed;

                phpmyadmin:
                        ensure => installed,
                        require => [Package['php5-cgi'], Package['lighttpd']],
                        notify => File['50-phpmyadmin.conf'];

                sun-java6-jre:
                        ensure => installed,
                        require => Exec[preseed-licence-dlj];
        }

        file {
                '50-phpmyadmin.conf':
                        name => "/etc/lighttpd/conf-available/50-phpmyadmin.conf",
                        ensure => "/etc/phpmyadmin/lighttpd.conf",
                        notify => Exec[lighttpd-enable-phpmyadmin]
        }

        exec {
                "lighttpd-enable-phpmyadmin":
                        command => "lighty-enable-mod fastcgi phpmyadmin",
                        refreshonly => true,
                        notify => Exec[lighttpd-restart];

                "lighttpd-restart":
                        command => "/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart",
                        refreshonly => true;

                "preseed-licence-dlj":
                        command => "echo sun-java5-jdk shared/accepted-sun-dlj-v1-1 boolean true | debconf-set-selections";
        }
}

Initially installing Alfresco

To have something to put into the git repo we first must install Alfresco the usual way for your platform. If you are installing on a 64bit install you will need to install ia32libs first too.

• ./Alfresco-Labs-3Stable-Linux-x86-Install --mode console

Once installed turn your install into a git repo.

• cd Alfresco

• git init

• git add .

• git commit -m "Initial install of Alfresco Labs 3 Stable"

Now we need to define some exclusions for files that are changed or defined after install such as log folders and user data.

• echo "alf-backstop-*
  alf_data/
  alfresco.log
  tomcat/logs/
  tomcat/temp/
  tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml
  tomcat/webapps/alfresco/
  tomcat/webapps/share/
  tomcat/webapps/studio/
  tomcat/work/
  virtual-tomcat/logs/
  virtual-tomcat/work/
  alfresco.log.*
  tomcat/webapps/alfresco.war-*" >> .git/info/exclude

Your git repo is now ready to be uploaded to you preferred place of storing git repos such as a file server or gitosis. I’m using a file server via ssh.

• ssh git@fileserver "mkdir Alfresco; cd Alfresco; git init"

• git remote add origin git@fileserver:Alfresco

• git push origin master

• scp .git/info/exclude git@fileserver:Alfresco/.git/info/exclude

Congratulations! You now have a fresh install of Alfresco stored in git on your fileserver.

Initial configuration

Before checking out on a new server there are a few changes we needed to commit.

File: initialize.sh:

#!/bin/sh
ALF_HOME=/opt/Alfresco
# Uncomment the following line if not using puppet
#apt-get install imagemagick mysql-server openoffice.org-headless php5-cgi swftools sun-java6-jre
echo "Creating init.d links"
ln -s $ALF_HOME/alfresco.sh /etc/init.d/alfresco
ln -s $ALF_HOME/virtual_alf.sh /etc/init.d/virtual_alf
update-rc.d alfresco defaults
ln -s $ALF_HOME/alfresco.sh /etc/init.d/alfresco
ln -s $ALF_HOME/virtual_alf.sh /etc/init.d/virtual_alf
update-rc.d alfresco defaults
update-rc.d virtual_alf defaults
echo "Creating MySQL database tables - Password for MySQL root user:"
mysql -u root -p < $ALF_HOME/extras/databases/mysql/db_setup.sql
[ ! -d $ALF_HOME/tomcat/logs ] || mkdir $ALF_HOME/tomcat/logs
[ ! -d $ALF_HOME/virtual-tomcat/logs ] || mkdir $ALF_HOME/virtual-tomcat/logs

initialize.sh links alfresco into /etc/init.d, sets it to start at boot time and creates the alfresco mysql user. If you are using the puppet recipe above then the default mysql root password is blank and should be changed either at the command line or from phpmyadmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/). If you are not using puppet then uncomment the apt-get line at the top of the file and customise the dependencies for your needs.

File: alfresco.sh and virtual_alf.sh

Change @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ to your install dir, eg: /opt/Alfresco
Change @@JAVA_HOME@@ to your jvm dir, eg: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/

File: tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/repository.properties

There is a conflict with the port used by the virtual server that needs to be changed else the virtual server will not start a second time and complain that the port is already in use (and it is).

Change avm.rmi.service.port=50501 to avm.rmi.service.port=50509

Commit

First get a list of files you have changed:

• git status

If you want to commit all those changed files then commit like:

• git commit -a -m "You commit message"

Or if you only want to commit a couple of the changes, eg:

• git add initialize.sh alfresco.sh virtual_alf.sh

• git commit -m "Your commit message"

Now push the changes:

• git push origin master

And you will find you use that process fairly often to start with. I also found myself using branching to test larger changes or changes I wanted to keep separate for now. But documenting all of those commands is beyond this post. Other changes I made were changing the database backend to mysql and authentication to active directory.

Checkout Initialize Run

Now lets test it. Lets assume your using a clean install of Ubuntu again (with a puppet client setup already).

• sudo git clone git@fileserver:Alfresco /opt/Alfresco

• sudo scp git@fileserver:Alfresco/.git/info/exclude /opt/Alfresco/.git/info/exclude

• sudo /opt/Alfresco/initialize.sh

• sudo /etc/init.d/alfresco start

Your Alfresco server should start after a few minutes and be ready for testing. You can commit and push changes from any checkout too.

There may be other files or directories you need to add to the exclude file too. You will see most of these after starting Alfresco the running git status.

Stay tuned for: Active Directory integration