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Pre-requisite

Silverpeas V5 has been tested and can be automatically deployed on JBoss 6.x. Silverpeas V5 has also been successfully deployed and run on other Application Servers (such as Websphere, Weblogic, ect.). Please find a list of the tools you will need to install Silverpeas below.

Java 6

Silverpeas needs a Java SE Development Kit (JDK) of version 6, which can be downloaded from Oracle here.
Don't forget to set-up the environment variable JAVA_HOME.

Users have encountered some problems when using JDK 7 with JBoss 6.x so we currently advise you against using Java 7 with Silverpeas.

Apache Maven

Apache Maven 3.0.x is used in Silverpeas for the building of components and the assembly. It must be installed on the target platform.
To install Maven, follw these steps:

  1. Download Maven 3.0.x from the Apache web site or one of its mirrors.
  2. Uncompress the downloaded archive in a directory
  3. Define the environment variable M2_HOME to the resulting directory.
  4. Add %M2_HOME%\bin to your %PATH% variable.

For a complete installation description, see Maven - The Definitive Guide

For more information about Apache Maven, please see the their website or download the ebook

If you are behind a proxy don't forget to configure it correctly for Maven:

  • Edit or create the file ~/.m2/settings.xml.
  • Add the follwing instructions according to your proxy configuration
    <settings>
      ...
      <proxies>
       <proxy>
          <active>true</active>
          <protocol>http</protocol>
          <host>proxy.somewhere.com</host>
          <port>8080</port>
          <username>proxyuser</username>
          <password>somepassword</password>
          <nonProxyHosts>www.google.com|*.somewhere.com</nonProxyHosts>
        </proxy>
      </proxies>
      ...
    </settings>

For a complete configuration description, see this Maven documentation page. For a complete description of each parameter see Maven Settings.xml configuration page.

Postgresql

Silverpeas can use any JDBC compliant RDBMS, however the Open source solution is pre-configured to run on PostgreSQL 9.x. which can be downloaded from here.

You will have to create a database SilverpeasV5 with a user postgres/postgres with administrative rights. You may use the tool pgAdmin which provides a GUI to manage Postgresql.

Postgresql on GNU/Linux

For GNU/Linux users, here are the commands to run from a xTerm console to configure such a database :

              silverpeas@sd-7358:~$ sudo apt-get install postgresql
              silverpeas@sd-7358:~$  sudo -i
              root@sd-7358:~$  su – postgres
              postgres@sd-7358:~$ psql -d template1 -c "ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD '*******'"
              # createdb -E UTF-8 SilverpeasV5
              # exit

ImageMagick

Silverpeas uses the image handling tool suite ImageMagick to render the preview of documents. Up to 5.14, ImageMagick was only a recommendation to enhance the user experience of Silverpeas. With Silverpeas 5.15, it is now a requirement as it is also used to resize images used in the Web pages.

It is a free software (free as freedom) that can be downloaded from this page

SWFTools, Ghostscript and Pdf2Json

Whereas not required to run and to use Silverpeas, we recommend strongly to install the SWFTools tool suite to enhance the user experience with Silverpeas. It is used by Silverpeas to preview and to visualize any document content (whatever the document format). It depends on the Ghostscript software so you have also to install it.

Pdf2Json is another tool, developed and provided by FlexPaper. It is used by Silverpeas to split a large document into smaller pieces in order to be processed more efficiently by FlexPaper (that is used in the visualization of document content).

They are all free softwares (free as freedom) and they can be downloaded from:

If you expect to install Silverpeas on a server running with a Debian-based distribution, you cannot use the SWFTools software packaged with your distribution. Indeed, it lacks of the program pdf2swf that is used by Silverpeas.

Installation

You will get better performance with GNU/Linux systems.

Installing JBoss

Since version 5.8, Silverpeas runs by default with JBoss AS 6.1.0. If you are upgrading from Silverpeas 5.7 or older please check your JBoss version.

We have patched JBoss 6.1.0 to fix several important security vulnerabilities. You can download it from:

You have to set-up the environment variable JBOSS_HOME for the directory in which you have extracted the JBoss archive.

Please note that the administration console and the JMX console are activated per default on JBoss 6.x, if you plan to use this server in production, don't forget to secure them or to remove them, following files:

  • $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy/admin-console-activator-jboss-beans.xml
  • $JBOSS_HOME/server/default/deploy/jmx-console-activator-jboss-beans.xml

the Jboss community provides also a groovy script to secure your Jboss 6.x instance : follow the instructions from this page.

The first installation of Silverpeas will secure this for you since Silverpeas 5.9, but be careful, the upgrade process doesn't secure your server.

Since the version 6.x, JBoss AS embeds HornetQ as the JMS provider. The version in JBoss AS 6.1.0 is buggy and consequence you need to upgrade it to a more recent version. From the minor version 5.11.1, Silverpeas is provided with an upgrade of HornetQ to the version 2.2.24. For the older versions of Silverpeas V5 (since 5.9) , an archive with all the necessary for upgrading HornetQ is available: hornetq-upgrade.zip; unzip the archive and copy the content of the unzipped folder hornetq-upgrade into your Silverpeas installation (%SILVERPEAS_HOME% on Windows, $SILVERPEAS_HOME on Unix).

Preparing Silverpeas

We currently provide a packaged and pre-configured version that will build Silverpeas and its database. Please download

Stable release for JBoss AS 6.x
Development release

1. Unzip/decompress the contents into a silverpeas directory,

2. Define an environment variable SILVERPEAS_HOME that points to this directory.

For example:
Unzip the silverpeas-5.15-jboss6.zip file into C:\Java.
The %SILVERPEAS_HOME% should be located at C:/Java/silverpeas-5.15-jboss6 (the slash instead of backslash characters are normal and the environment variable SILVERPEAS_HOME should be set as such).

Configuration

Silverpeas configuration is defined in the directory %SILVERPEAS_HOME%\setup\settings\. There you should find three files :

  • config.properties: where you can configure the database connection and other Silverpeas parameters such as the JVM parameters for the application. We provide a sample_config.properties file which you can copy and edit to specify only your configuration changes.
  • JBossSettings.xml: this is used for configuraing JBoss, you should not have to edit it.
  • SilverpeasSettings.xml: this is a default configuration for Silverpeas. If you want your own specific configuration, you can copy and paste this file to CustomerSettings.xml where you can define your own configuration. Creating the CustomerSettings.xml file will avoid editing the configuration files for each upgrade of Silverpeas.

Deploying Silverpeas

This is a 4 steps operation which are to be executed inside the directory %SILVERPEAS_HOME%\bin:

  1. mvn clean install
  2. appBuilder.bat
  3. SilverpeasSettings.bat
  4. dbBuilder.bat

Launching Silverpeas

In %SILVERPEAS_HOME%\bin you can launch Silverpeas with silverpeas_start_jboss.cmd.

In %SILVERPEAS_HOME%\bin you can stop Silverpeas with silverpeas_stop_jboss.cmd.

You can now access Silverpeas through the following url: http://localhost:8000/silverpeas and using the account: SilverAdmin/SilverAdmin.