Antville needs Helma Object Publisher to be installed on the desired machine. If not already done so please download Helma and follow the installation instructions.
Furthermore, Antville needs an SQL database to be installed as well. Currently supported products are PostgreSQL and MySQL. If not already done so please install the desired database before you continue.
For connecting Antville to the database the corresponding JDBC driver is also necessary. If not already done so please copy the driver to the directory lib/ext of Helma’s installation directory.
As of writing this installation guide the drivers could be downloaded via the following URLs:
Of course you can also use a packet manager like aptitude or MacPorts if the JDBC driver is available from there. However, you then need to create a symbolic link to the driver from within Helma’s lib/ext directory.
Now unpack the Antville distribution package. Move the resulting directory antville into the directory apps of your Helma installation.
Inside the directory antville you will find a directory called db. This directory contains all database-related files, ie. several SQL scripts for creating the database needed by the application. Change to that directory.
Antville currently comes with scripts for PostgreSQL (postgre.sql) and for MySQL databases (my.sql).
Note: Antville is preconfigured for PostgreSQL out of the box but it is easy to modify the configuration to be compatible with MySQL.
Each of these SQL scripts creates the tables, indexes and initial records and also the account used by the application to communicate with the database.
The default password of this account is antville, so you should change it if you want to secure your installation. Open the desired SQL script and scroll down to the create user (for PostgreSQL) or grant user (for MySQL) statement. Search for password (PostgreSQL) or identified by (MySQL) and change the trailing value in quotes to the password of your choice.
Please refer to the documentation of your database on how to run the appropriate script. Afterwards you will have to tell Antville how it can access your database. This is done in a configuration file named db.properties which is located in the code directory, or – if you are going for MySQL – in the db/my.compat directory.
Open the desired file and ensure that the line beginning with antville.url points to the server that runs the database. By default, this is the local machine aka localhost which will be just right in most cases.
Check that the password is set accordingly to the one you entered in the SQL script and save the file.
Finally, you need to tell Helma about the new application. This is done by adding the contents of the file apps.properties in the extra directory to the file apps.properties located in the top installation directory.
Note: If you are using MySQL you need to edit and enable line 5 (the one defining antville.repository.1) of the file by removing the leading comment symbol #.
Now start up Helma and point your browser to
http://localhost:8080
(assuming that Helma is running on the same machine and uses port 8080).
You should see Antville’s start page where you can create a first user account that automatically has system administration rights to your Antville installation.
Have fun!
- Install Helma if not already done so
- Install PostgreSQL or MySQL database if not already done so
- Install corresponding JDBC driver in helma/lib/ext
- Unpack Antville distribution file
- Move antville directory into helma/app directory
- Run the desired script in antville/db for either PostgreSQL or MySQL
- Copy contents of antville/extra/apps.properties to helma/apps.properties
- If necessary, enable MySQL compatibility in apps.properties
- Start up Helma and browse to http://localhost:8080/antville