Alfresco

Alfresco is a CMS.

Installation
First of all, make sure you have Tomcat 6 up and running. If it isn't, follow a good guide first.

Alfresco uses a database to store the meta information. Currently Alfresco supports several database backends. For example purposes, this guide will explain to you how to use the MySQL backend, and if you're going to use MySQL too, make sure you have that installed as well.

For Alfresco you need a few additional applications:

There is no alfresco ebuild, so download it from SourceForge.net. The Alfresco Community packages can be found here. Download the one called "alfresco-community-war- .tar.gz" and extract it into /opt/alfresco:

Create the MySQL database by using the SQL script supplied with Alfresco:

Or create the MySQL database manually with the following snipplet:

Now you'll need to create the directory for the Alfresco repository, ehcache and make the user and group tomcat it's owner:

Copy the Alfresco Community WAR file into Tomcat's web application directory and restart Tomcat:

Check and watch for the following line: /var/log/tomcat-6/catalina.out

If you can find that line then it is time to modify some Alfresco specific properties. Edit located in  and set the variable  to the above created directory for Alfresco:

Attention!! if you use extentions, it is sometimes needed to change the dir.root in their properties file!!

Scroll down in the property file and change the MySQL configuration options to match your setup:

If you're using UTF-8 with MySQL then append to the db.url line the options to use UTF-8:

You can add more options to the connect URL. To enable, for example, the auto reconnect option, you would need to add to the URL. The syntax for the JDBC MySQL connection URL is described in the JDBC manual. For completeness here is a short hint on how the syntax might look for MySQL:

jdbc:mysql://[host][,failoverhost...][:port]/[database][?propertyName1][=propertyValue1][&propertyName2][=propertyValue2]...

Configure logging by changing the path where Alfreso writes the log file. For that you'll need to edit the file located in  and set the variable  to log into Tomcat's log directory:

After all those changes you need to restart Tomcat again and watch the log file for a successful start of Alfresco (this can take some minutes):

You are now finished with the basic install of Alfresco Community. Open your browser and point to http://localhost:8080/alfresco (the initial administrator user is called "admin" and the password is "admin").

You can now install additional Alfresco extensions. You don't need them for a basic Alfresco installation, but they can offer you some extras.

Enable the MySQL specific driver settings (and disable the others) in the following property files located under /var/lib/tomcat-6/webapps/alfresco/:

If you want to enable more languages on the web client, then follow these steps:

You need to restart Tomcat to pick up the new configuration:

Unable to resolve server IP address
If you get an error unable to resolve server IP address and Alfresco will not start:

Make sure that your /etc/hosts file or your DNS has the correct values.