Install on Ubuntu

How to install the BIMserver on a freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Server

These instructions are for the 1.2 release.

The machine this was tested on was a Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 LTS Amazon EC2 server (Ubuntu Cloud Guest AMI ID ami-d0f89fb9 (x86_64)) on an m1.xlarge machine.

Introduction

This guide is 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

Commands

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 ntp2.xs4all.nl	Update the local time, useful when looking in log files
dpkg-reconfigure tzdata	Select timezone
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
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

nano /opt/tomcat7/conf/server.xml

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

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

Edit /etc/default/tomcat7 (with "nano" for example), change the line with "JAVA_OPTS" to: JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx12G -Xss4096k"

The 12G parameter indicates 12GB of heap memory, please adjust to your server (always keep a few hundred megabytes free for your OS and other apps).

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).

Restart Tomcat: service tomcat7 restart

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