Downloading and Installing Alfresco Community Edition 4.2 on Ubuntu

Update: A more recent post discusses deploying Alfresco 5.0 Community Edition on Ubuntu 13.10

In this post, I want to write about downloading and installing Alfresco, an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System.

From the primary site, I navigated to url http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Download_And_Install_Alfresco to see available installers for the Community Edition of the software.

Clicking on the second link for Linux installer, brought the following page.

Clicking on the Download Now link, started downloading the installer on my Downloads folder. The download was a large file. As download began, it gave a link to join the alfresco community, which I did.

Once download was complete, I closed the browser to proceed. To install, move the installer to a target folder from the downloads folder.

Next, we need to make the installer executable

$ chmod a+x *.bin

Now, we need to run the installer by issuing the following command

$ ./alfresco-community-4.2.c-installer-linux-x64.bin

This brings the dialog box for default language

Next screen, informs that we are setting up the community edition of the software

Clicked on forward gives the following screen. Since, I knew I would have to modify the port entries, I selected the Advanced option to change default ports and other settings.

On the next screen, I checked off the software components that I already had on my machine (Java, PostgreSQL, LibreOffice) and turned off the components I did not need (SharePoint). Ended up making the following selections

In the next screen, we select the installation folder. I updated the default location to something of my preference.

I wanted to deploy the software against PostgreSQL, which is the option it gave me. I created a user called alfresco and a database called alfresco with the following commands.

$ su - postgres

postgres$ psql -d template1

psql > create user alfresco with password 'alfresco';

psql > create database alfresco;

psql > grant all on database alfresco to alfresco;

With the database created, I can resume the installation to go to the next screen that prompts to enter the database connection values.

The next screen displays the ports to be setup. I checked my open ports using appropriate tools. I have posted on the way to check available ports here. Based on the results, I modified the default port entries as follows:

Next the installation prompted for a ftp port setting. I left it as default.

Next the installer prompted for the RMI port for remote invocation. I again left it as default.

Finally, the installer asks the installer to specify a password for the admin user. I kept it as “alfresco”.

Clicking on Forward brought a prompt indicating the setup was ready as shown below.

Clicking on the Forward button, starts the installation. It takes a while after setting up the files for the installation to complete.

After the installation is complete, the following prompt is shown.

Next, I launched a browser and accessed the location (http://ub1204.arthgallo.com:8083/alfresco) on my browser.

The application took some time as the initial tables were setup in the database repository and finally the Alfresco site was displayed on the browser.

In this post, we saw how to setup Alfresco Community Edition, an Enterprise Content Management software on an Ubuntu 12.04 machine.

Addendum

To install alfresco on a machine without xwindows, you can run the installer in text mode with the following command.

$ ./alfresco-community-4.2.c-installer-linux-x64.bin --mode text

See the screenshot below.

Cheers .....