Install Community Dashboard Tools on Pentaho BI Server 4.5 Community Edition

Soon after installing and setting up Pentaho Community Edition on my box, I realized that it does not ship with a dashboard tool. That has to be installed from another project called CTools.

Downloading CTools

CTools is available at http://www.webdetails.pt/index.html#ctools. Once you access this URL, you will access the following page.

The page contains a link to download Ctools bundle. Accessing that link shows the following page on the Github site.

We can download the shell script and the README.txt file to our local folder. I must warn that saving the ctools-installer directly from the browser and right clicking, actually gave me the html of the current page, rather than the file. For downloading the file, I had to click the file, go into edit mode and copy-paste the contents to a local shell script file.

Anyways, I downloaded it to a folder called ctools under my Pentaho folder. The first thing is to make ctools executable. This is done by entering the following command on the command line in a terminal window.

> chmod a+x *.sh

The next thing we need to do is to run the installer with the correct parameters. This is done, as shown below.

> ./ctools-installer.sh -s pentahoServer/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions -w pentahoServer/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho

On my machine, the above works out to the following.

> ./ctools-installer.sh -s ~/Work/Servers/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions -w ~/Work/Servers/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho

Executing the above script, we can see that the script downloads the necessary files needed for the installation. The script prompts to replace several of the existing scripts that I accepted, as show below.

Once the prompts are through, the installation starts and finally it is done!

Now we need to start the embedded tomcat instance contained within Pentaho dashboard, and we can see that upon logging in as a user, we can access additional links for Community Dashboards (called CDB, CDV, CDE and CDC).

Accessing link for CDE (Community Dashboard Editor), the user can now define their own dashboards as shown below.

That's it. We have successfully installed Community Dashboards on Pentaho Community Edition. In the next post, we will see how to configure a dashboard.