May 24
Dear Community members,
Maybe you are following @bonitasoft on Twitter, and so you may already know: we will demonstrate Bonita BPM 6 (please, notice the new name) at Solution Linux in Paris next week!
Of course, we know that not all our community members can attend as you are all over the world. Stay tuned – we’ll be putting events and webinars on the agenda for everyone, soon.
If you can’t wait, go to our Facebook page and tell us which Bonita BPM version 6.0 feature interests you most?
May 21
Dear Community members,
Just a small post to remind you that BonitaSoft is going to be at Solution Linux, May 28-29th 2103. We’ll be at booth “C21″.
We look forward to meeting you “in real life!” Let’s chat about BOS, our Community, ideas and questions you have, or whatever … you are welcome!
This tutorial continues the explanation about how to set up Bonita Open Solution on a full Open Source stack, from installation of Bonita Studio through running a process on the production server.
Part 1 began with the installation of Bonita Studio, and this post is about installing a basic production server. You will use:
This tutorial is aimed for beginners, but you will need to have Ubuntu installed and have basic knowledge about using terminals.
I used VirtualBox to install Ubuntu Server, with a bridged network configuration so it has its own IP address over the network. (Of course, feel free to install Ubuntu Server on some actual hardware.) Set “bonita” as the first user and “bpm” as the password. (Note that this is appropriate for the tutorial, but for production, you should of course use more secured credentials.) As said in the introduction, this will not cover the entire installation of Ubuntu Server. However, it is useful to show that during the installation, you can select some packages to be pre-installed. As you can see in the second screenshot below, you should select “OpenSSH server”, “LAMP Server”, “PostgreSQL database” and “Tomcat Java Server”.
When the installation is finished, I suggest you update all packages:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
If you let dhcp manage the IP address for you, retrieve the address of the server. It will be very useful to use SSH in a terminal, and then have control of the server from the desktop PC where you’ve already installed Bonita Studio:
sudo ifconfig
The system will ask for your password. Once you have your IP address, you can start a terminal on your desktop PC. Using SSH, you can remote control the server from the desktop PC, so you can do all steps of the tutorial with copy / paste, etc.
ssh bonita@192.168.0.209
Of course, change the IP address to that of your server. Then, provide the password (“bpm” for this tutorial) and confirm the creation of the key. You should get something like this:
If you selected PostgreSQL to be installed by Ubuntu Server, PostgreSQL 9.1 is installed and its default configuration is mostly good. You just need to install the PostgreSQL JDBC driver, to define the password of “postgre” PostgreSQL user, and define a user for BOS, so you can connect to the server and use databases.
sudo -u postgres psql postgres
You’ll get the Postgres prompt, like this:
postgres=#
Set a password for the “postgres” database role using the command:
\password postgres
Enter your password and confirm it. For the tutorial, use “bpm”. Then, create the bonita user.
CREATE ROLE bonita WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'bpm';
Now, create the two Bonita databases, “bonita_journal” and “bonita_history”, and grant privileges to the “bonita” user.
CREATE DATABASE bonita_history;
CREATE DATABASE bonita_journal;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE bonita_history TO bonita;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE bonita_journal TO bonita;
To quit the PostgreSQL shell:
\q
And press enter. You should be again on the remote system prompt. If your PostgreSQL server is not on the same system as the Tomcat server, or if you use a remote GUI like pgAdmin III to control PostgreSQL, you’ll need to modify two files of PostgreSQL configuration, so it can listen on the network: “pg_hba.conf” and “postgresql.conf”.
cd /etc/postgresql/9.1/main
sudo nano pg_hba.conf
At the end of the file, add these lines:
# Allow any user from host 192.168.12.10 to connect to all # databases if the user's password is correctly supplied. # # TYPE DATABASE USER ADDRESS METHOD host all all 192.168.0.0/24 md5
To save and quit, “ctrl+x”, “y”, and enter. Then,
sudo nano postgresql.conf
Find the line starting with “#listen_addresses = ‘localhost’” and change it to:
listen_addresses = '*'
To save and quit, “ctrl+x”, “y”, and enter. Once this is done, the server must be restarted.
sudo service postgresql restart
If you want to have a GUI to control PostgreSQL on your desktop, you can install the package “pgadmin3″. You can use Synaptic, Software Center, aptitude or apt-get. The fastest at this point is to create a new tab in the already open terminal: “File / Open Tab” or “ctrl+shift+t”.
sudo apt-get install pgadmin3
You can now start pgAdmin III from the menu. Click on the plug button to create a new connection to a server, fill in the information requested and you are ready. If you go to “bonita_history” or “bonita_journal”, you should have 77 tables for both.
PostgreSQL is ready!
First step: download, unzip and copy the BOS bundle files to the “bonita” user home directory, in this case: “/home/bonita/”
cd ~/
wget -i -B http://download.forge.objectweb.org/bonita/BOS-5.10-deploy.zip
sudo apt-get install unzip
unzip -d bos_deploy BOS-5.10-deploy.zip
cd ~/bos_deploy/
“~/bos_deploy”, or “/home/bonita/bos_deploy” is your <BOS_DEPLOY> folder. Of course, you can put this directory elsewhere. Keep <BOS_DEPLOY> path for future reference on this tutorial, BOS forum, documentation and training. You now need to install the JDBC driver. The installer will install JDBC3 and JDBC4 files, and provide a few very useful links. The interesting link is “/usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc4.jar”, which will always be related to the latest JBC4 version. Link it in “<BOS_DEPLOY>/bonita_execution_engine/engine/libs/”. This way, if PostgreSQL JDBC driver is updated by the system, you don’t have to update the link.
sudo apt-get install libpostgresql-jdbc-java
cd ~/bos_deploy/bonita_execution_engine/engine/libs/
ln -s /usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc4.jar .
Before running the initDatabase.sh script to create BOS databases tables, edit two files: “bonita-history.properties” and “bonita-journal.properties”. They are in “<BOS_DEPLOY>/conf/bonita/server/default/conf”.
cd ~/bos_deploy/conf/bonita/server/default/conf
For both file, check that all lines in the header are commented out. Then, find the PostgreSQL section, uncomment those lines and fill databases login and password.
nano bonita-history.properties
To quit and save, “ctrl+x” then “y” and “enter”. Take care to not change the name of the file.
nano bonita-journal.properties
To quit and save, “ctrl+x” then “y” and “enter”. Take care to not change the name of the file. Below are the copy of the different sections. Both header are the same, and the PostgreSQL section is slightly different.
##################################
# Default database configuration #
##################################
# IMPORTANT: do not use those settings for production!
# By default Bonita uses a H2 database that will store all data in one file.
# Access to the database is done through a datasource configured in Tomcat configuration file: conf/context.xml
# H2 Hibernate dialect
#hibernate.dialect org.hibernate.dialect.H2Dialect
# Using an interceptor can change the database behaviour. By default, an interceptor is defined to order the result of queries by adding null values at the end.
#bonita.hibernate.interceptor org.ow2.bonita.env.interceptor.H2DescNullFirstInterceptor
# Table are automatically create in database
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto update
# Location of the datasource (define in Tomcat configuration file: conf/context.xml)
# hibernate.connection.datasource java:/comp/env/bonita/default/journal
# Default database connection over H2 (not using datasources)
#hibernate.connection.driver_class org.h2.Driver
#hibernate.connection.url jdbc:h2:file:${BONITA_HOME}/server/default/work/databases/bonita_journal.db;FILE_LOCK=NO;MVCC=TRUE;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=TR$
#hibernate.connection.username bonita
#hibernate.connection.password bpm
#hibernate.default_schema journal
## # POSTGRESQL hibernate.dialect org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect hibernate.connection.driver_class org.postgresql.Driver hibernate.connection.url jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_history hibernate.connection.username bonita hibernate.connection.password bpm
## # POSTGRESQL hibernate.dialect org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect hibernate.connection.driver_class org.postgresql.Driver hibernate.connection.url jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_journal hibernate.connection.username bonita hibernate.connection.password bpm
Now that the configuration is done, you can run the initDatabase.sh script.
cd ~/bos_deploy/bonita_execution_engine/database
chmod +x initDatabase.sh
./initDatabase.sh
The script asks three questions:
/home/bonita/bos_deploy/conf/bonita
The script will create the tables in “journal” and “history” databases. If you check the structure, you should see 77 tables in both databases.
In order to finish the configuration of BOS bundle, copy the “bonita” directory and “jaas-standard.cfg” in <BOS_DEPLOY> to “/opt” and set the rights for Tomcat. First, edit “jaas-standard.cfg”:
cd ~/bos_deploy/conf/external/security
sudo nano jaas-standard.cfg
Remove the lines
BonitaAuth-default {
org.ow2.bonita.identity.auth.BonitaIdentityLoginModule required domain="default";
org.ow2.bonita.identity.auth.LocalStorageLoginModule required domain="default";
};
BonitaStore-default {
org.ow2.bonita.identity.auth.LocalStorageLoginModule required domain="default";
};
To save and quit, “ctrl+x”, then “y” and “enter”. Now, copy all the files in “/opt” and set the rights:
cd /opt/
sudo mkdir bos_conf
sudo cp -r ~/bos_deploy/conf/bonita/ /opt/bos_conf/bonita/
sudo cp ~/bos_deploy/conf/external/security/jaas-standard.cfg /opt/bos_conf/
cd /opt/
sudo chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 bos_conf
When you configure Tomcat, define the context for the Bonita web application. So now that you have created the databases tables, you can prepare “bonita-journal.properties” and “bonita-history.properties” for production. The aim is to comment again the PostgreSQL configuration, and instead, insert the lines of the future datasource configuration.
cd /opt/bos_conf/bonita/server/default/conf
sudo nano bonita-history.properties
To quit and save, “ctrl+x” then “y” and “enter”. Take care to not change the name of the file.
sudo nano bonita-journal.properties
To quit and save, “ctrl+x” then “y” and “enter”. Take care to not change the name of the file. Below is a copy of the different sections.
## # POSTGRESQL hibernate.dialect org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect #hibernate.connection.driver_class org.postgresql.Driver #hibernate.connection.url jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_history #hibernate.connection.username bonita #hibernate.connection.password bpm hibernate.connection.datasource java:/comp/env/bonita/default/history
## # POSTGRESQL hibernate.dialect org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect #hibernate.connection.driver_class org.postgresql.Driver #hibernate.connection.url jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_journal #hibernate.connection.username bonita #hibernate.connection.password bpm hibernate.connection.datasource java:/comp/env/bonita/default/journal
If you selected Tomcat to be installed by Ubuntu Server, Tomcat6 is installed and its default configuration is mostly good. Next, link the PostgreSQL JDBC driver to Tomcat lib.
cd /usr/share/tomcat6/lib
sudo ln -s /usr/share/java/postgresql-jdbc4.jar .
To set datasources, create a bonita.xml file with the context so the web application can access to the PostgreSLQ databases “bonita_journal” and “bonita_hystory”.
cd /etc/tomcat6/Catalina/localhost/
sudo nano bonita.xml
Then, paste the content below in the terminal with the middle button, or with “ctrl+shift+c”:
<Context path='/bonita'>
<Resource name='bonita/default/journal'
auth='Container'
type='javax.sql.DataSource'
username='bonita'
password='bpm'
driverClassName='org.postgresql.Driver'
url='jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_journal'
maxActive='20'
maxIdle='10'
maxWait='-1' />
<Resource name='bonita/default/history'
auth='Container'
type='javax.sql.DataSource'
username='bonita'
password='bpm'
driverClassName='org.postgresql.Driver'
url='jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/bonita_history'
maxActive='20'
maxIdle='10'
maxWait='-1' />
</Context>
To save and quit nano: press “ctrl+x”, then “y” to save, and “enter” to validate the name of the file (“bonita.xml”). If you undeploy a Bonita web application, this file will be deleted by Tomcat. So, save it in the the “bonita” user directory.
cp /etc/tomcat6/Catalina/localhost/bonita.xml ~/bonita.xml
To configure Bonita, system variables need to be defined. To do that, edit “/etc/default/tomcat6″. This way, every time Tomcat6 restarts, it will use the correct information.
sudo nano /etc/default/tomcat6
In the line:
JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
Remove “-Xmx128m”. You should have something like:
At the end of the file, paste the information below:
BONITA_HOME="-DBONITA_HOME=/opt/bos_conf/bonita" BONITA_API_TYPE="-Dorg.ow2.bonita.api-type=Standard" SECURITY_OPTS="-Djava.security.auth.login.config=/opt/bos_conf/jaas-standard.cfg" CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS $BONITA_HOME $BONITA_API_TYPE $SECURITY_OPTS -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8-Xshare:auto -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError" export CATALINA_OPTS
Take care to set the path you used if it is different from the tutorial.
To save and quit, “ctrl+x”, then “y” and “enter”. Then restart Tomcat:
sudo service tomcat6 restart
Tomcat is ready!
Test if everything is running well with a bonita.war file provided in the deploy bundle. In Ubuntu, webapps must be placed in “/var/lib/tomcat6/”.
sudo cp ~/bos_deploy/bonita_user_experience/with_execution_engine_without_client/bonita.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/
sudo chown tomcat6:tomcat6 bonita.war
sudo service tomcat6 restart
When Tomcat is restarted, open your favourite web browser, and go to “http://localhost:8080/bonita/” or “http://yourIPaddress:8080/bonita/”. Example, in this tutorial: “http://192.168.0.209:8080/bonita/”. You can log using “admin” and “bpm”.
If you already have a .bar file to test, go ahead and use it. If you don’t, then start BOS Studio, select “Buy a mini”, and in the menu, select “File / Export”. It will create the “Buy_a_MINI–3.2.bar” file. In the User Experience, click on “Administration” on the top right, then “Processes” and “Install”. On the popup, “Choose file” and then, click on “Install”, then “Close”. When the upload is finished (you can see a message display on the top right of the processes list) the process should be displayed in the deployed process list.
To start a process instance, go back to the “User view”. In the left column, under “Start a case”, click on “Buy a MINI”. The form should appear, if you can play with the process, everything is working.
If you check the content of the database, it should have changed to reflect the activity of the process.
You are done, and your production server for Bonita Open Solution 5.10 is ready.
Are you having problems installing and running BOS 5.10? You can get support from the community on the forum: http://www.bonitasoft.org/forum/. You will find the log in:
Don’t forget to provide their content on your forum post if necessary.
Ubuntu community documentation about Java
A special big thanks to the BonitaSoft Service team for their support and help with this tutorial.
Dear Bonita Community members,
We need you!
We are looking for Bonita Open Solution enthusiasts for a very special mission: to test our next release and give us some feedback.
But be fast: only the first 10 people to reply via a comment to this post can be part of the “happy few”.
Will you be one of our valued testers?
This tutorial is about how to set up Bonita Open Solution on a full Open Source stack, beginning with the installation of Bonita Studio through running a process on the production server.
We will use:
This tutorial is aimed for beginners, but you will need to have Ubuntu installed and have basic knowledge about using terminals.
This first post is about installing BOS 5.10: Bonita Studio. The second part is about installing a basic production server.
To get Bonita Studio working, you will need to have a Java machine. The purpose of this tutorial is to use Open Source software everywhere possible, so we will use OpenJDK. Open a terminal and run:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
As always when using “sudo”, the system will ask for your password. If your system has more than one version of Java, configure which one your system uses by entering the following command in a terminal window:
sudo update-alternatives --config java
This will present you with a selection that looks similar to the following (the details may differ for you):
There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).
Selection Path Priority Status
————————————————————
* 0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1061 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1061 manual mode
2 /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1051 manual mode
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 1
BOS 5.10 should work well with OpenJDK 6.
Go to http://www.bonitasoft.com/products/download/bonita-open-solution-32-or-64-bits-systems-2 If you want, you can register for free on the BonitaSoft corporate website (this is not compulsory). Yur download should start automatically. This package includes both the 32 bits and 64 bits versions of BOS. Once downloaded, just extract BOS in your home directory. In Ubuntu, you can do that simply with a right click on the archive, then choose “Extract here”. It is done.
Open the BOS-5.10 directory with the File Manager, and right click on BonitaStudio.sh. Choose “Properties”. In “Permissions”, check “Allow executing file as a program”.
To start Bonita Studio, double click on “BonitaStudio.sh”. Choose “Run” if you have to choose an action for executing this file. Bonita Studio should start.
Remember that when you start using BOS 5.10, don’t move its directory. If you do, you will lose your workspace.
Instead of starting BOS Studio with the BonitaStudio.sh file, you can create a launcher in the menu. Using the “Alacarte” menu editor, it should work in Unity, and in other desktop environments as well. First, install “Alacarte”:
sudo apt-get install alacarte
Then, in the application menu, look for “Alacarte” and start it. Select “Programming” section, or another section of your choice, then click on “New item”. On the “Create Launcher” window, fill in the following information:
Then click OK. The menu item is created. You should be able to find it in your menu.
If you have already used Bonita Studio on Windows, you know there is a useful Welcome screen. On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS it is missing. Bonita Studio needs a version of XulRunner that is not available in the repositories.
To fix that, we will get packages from Debian. Get the three packages below using your local mirror when possible:
Then copy them into your BOS-5.10 directory. Once this is done, open a terminal and follow the steps:
cd ~/BOS-5.10
sudo dpkg -i xulrunner-1.9.1_1.9.1.16-20_amd64.deb libhunspell-1.2-0_1.2.11-1_amd64.deb libmozjs2d_1.9.1.16-20_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get -f install
If you get dependency errors, “sudo apt-get -f install” will fix them and finish the installation of the packages. If you start Bonita Studio now, you should see the Welcome screen.
We need a process to test that everything is working well. Try using one of the processes packaged with BOS. On the Welcome screen, in the “Design” section, choose the “Buy a Mini” example. Once it is open, click on “Run” in the Studio menu. It should open your default Internet browser and start the process with the first form: “Choose a car”.
If you can play with the “Buy a Mini” process, it means that Bonita Studio is working. You can now start developing your processes.
Are you having problems installing and running BOS 5.10? You can get support from the community on the forum: http://www.bonitasoft.org/forum/ You will find the log in “~/BOS-5.10/studio/workspace/.metadata/”. There are two relevant files:
Don’t forget to provide their content on your forum post.
Thanks to PaulBais and Ivan Caplovic from the Bonita community for Xulrunner installation.
Ubuntu Community doc about Java
And of course, as always, we welcome your comments and ideas for other tutorials!
Mar 29
If you have been following the comments of my previous posts you already know: I think we need something new for the Bonita Community website. We have lots of Ideas, and I would like the community to chat about them. Of course, we can use the blog comments of this article for that.
First idea, community support: I am pretty sure you will agree that we need a way to make it more attractive and efficient than our “good old” forum. Looking on the web at what is popular at the moment, I think that a Question & Answer would do the job well!
Of course, this means we have to find a good system, so community members can continue to have a place to chat, aside.
Now, it is your turn. Please, tell me what you think of this Q&A idea. And of course, if you have other ideas, suggestions, feelings, they are welcome too 
