Install on Ubuntu

These instructions are for the 1.2 release.

How to install the BIMserver on a freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Server Amazon EC2 server.

AMI: Ubuntu Cloud Guest AMI ID ami-d0f89fb9 (x86_64) Instance: m1.xlarge machine

Of course most (if not all) of the instructions are generic enough for any Ubuntu installation.

Introduction

This guide can be used to install a BIMserver on a cloud based server. Root rights are assumed. When running as a normal user, prepend "sudo " to each command (or start your session with sudo -i).

Paths can be changed to your liking of course. This is just one way of doing things, yes you can use a different NTP server, yes you can use another JRE implementation etc...

Directories chosen for this installation:

/var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]/ROOT.war // For the BIMserver WAR file
/opt/tomcat7                    // For the Tomcat7 application
/var/bimserver/home             // For the BIMserver home directory

[YOUR DOMAIN] should be a DNS entry (can be a subdomain).

Commands

Basic configuration of Ubuntu

Command	Description
apt-get update	Update the package index
apt-get upgrade	Upgrade installed packages
apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless wget unzip nano ntpdate	Install JRE 7 and some tools
ntpdate 0.nl.pool.ntp.org	Update the local time, useful when looking in log files
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata	Select timezone

Create directories / users

Command	Description
mkdir /var/www	Create a /var/www directory if it's not already there
mkdir /var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]	Create a directory for you domain
useradd -s /sbin/nologin tomcat7	Create a tomcat7 user
chown -R tomcat7 /var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]	Give rights to tomcat7 user to write
mkdir /var/bimserver	Create a directory for you BIMserver home directory (this has nothing to do with /home on unix systems
chown -R tomcat7 /var/bimserver	Give the appropriate rights to the tomcat7 user

Install Tomcat7

Command	Description
cd /opt	Goto the /opt directory
wget http://apache.cs.uu.nl/dist/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.41/bin/apache-tomcat-7.0.41.zip	Download tomcat (Make sure you replace this with the latest release!)
unzip apache-tomcat-7.0.41.zip	Unzip Tomcat7
rm apache-tomcat-7.0.41.zip	Remove the downloaded zip file
mv apache-tomcat-7.0.41 tomcat7	Rename to convenient name
chmod +x /opt/tomcat7/bin/*.sh	Make .sh files executable
mkdir /opt/tomcat7/conf/policy.d	Create a policy directory
nano /opt/tomcat7/conf/policy.d/default.policy	Edit the default policy file

Paste the following default code (you can change this later!)

grant {
  permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

Command	Description
chown -R tomcat7 /opt/tomcat7	Change owner of directory tot tomcat7

Change the Tomcat7 configuration file:

nano /opt/tomcat7/conf/server.xml

Change the port attribute in the Connector tag to the desired port (also see: "Running op ports below 1024". Also add a new host, see below.

<Host name="[YOUR DOMAIN]" appBase="/var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
    <Context path="" docBase="/var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]/ROOT.war">
        <Parameter name="homedir" value="/var/bimserver/home"/>
    </Context>
</Host>

Startup script

To be able to starts/stop/restart tomcat7 you need an init.d script. You can find one [https://gist.github.com/baylisscg/942150 here]. Copy this file to /etc/init.d/tomcat7 and give it execute permissions (chmod +x /etc/init.d/tomcat7).

Change the file:

CATALINA_HOME=/opt/$NAME
CATALINA_BASE=/opt/$NAME
TOMCAT7_SECURITY=no // You can change this to yes later on
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre // Change this to your JRE directory

Find the line that says:

JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx4G"

and change the amount of heap memory to your liking. Always keep a few hundred megabytes free for your OS and other applications.

Restart Tomcat: service tomcat7 restart

Install BIMserver

Command	Description
cd /var/www/[YOUR DOMAIN]	Go to your domain folder
wget https://bimserver.googlecode.com/files/bimserver-1.2.war -O ROOT.war	Download the latest BIMserver (Make sure you replace this with the latest version!)

After this command, Tomcat 7 should start unpacking the downloaded war file in a directory called ROOT. After a while you should be able to connect to the BIMserver with a browser on your http://[YOUR DOMAIN]:[CONFIGURED PORT]. The page you will see should be showing the version of BIMserver and the status (should be NOT_SETUP if this is your first install). Continue to [Setup][setup] for further configuration.

When things are not working, you can look in the Tomcat 7 log file: /opt/tomcat7/logs/catalina.out and the BIMserver log file: /var/bimserver/home/logs/bimserver.log.

Installing an STMP server

You only have to do this if you do not already have an accessible SMTP server running in your network or with your ISP. Remember running your own SMTP server is a security/spam risk if you don't know how to properly install/maintain it.

apt-get install postfix

Select "Internet server", use a real domain name that is pointing to your server's IP address.

Running on ports below 1024

The tomcat7 user has no rights to bind to ports below 1024 (only root can), to make the server available on port 80 (the default HTTP port), you can use iptables (you might have to install the package "iptables"):

apt-get install iptables
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

to store these settings:

iptables-save

If you are running on Amazon or another Cloud provider, make sure you enable port 80 (or whatever port you redirect) on their firewall as well.