Download and Install opentaps 1.5 on Ubuntu

This post is about downloading and installing opentaps, a Java based Open Source ERP and CRM package built on top of Apache Ofbiz. My post deploys Opentaps against a Postgresql database.

Getting the 1.5 installer directly

To download the installer for version 1.5, you need to access the download site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaps/files/opentaps%201.5/. If one follows the website navigation, one ends erroneously on the version 1.4 download page as of the time of writing this post. The links on the website take one through a registration process and take you to the version 1.4 download links. The link posted above will take you to 1.5 directly.

If you actually wanted version 1.4 instead of 1.5

If you wanted version 1.4, then access the download section of the opentaps website (http://opentaps.org/products/download) . This site presents a form that needs to be filled out with your details to get to the download page.

Filling out the form presents the version 1.4 download link.

Continuing with 1.5 installation

I will continue this post with Opentaps version 1.5 installation that is started by accessing the link http://sourceforge.net/projects/opentaps/files/opentaps%201.5/. Once the user accesses the site, the download starts on the page as shown on the screenshot below.

Once I downloaded the zip file on my browser's download folder, I copied it to a location on my machine where I wanted to extract the zip.

Then opening a terminal window, I unzipped the contents as shown below by entering the command.

$ cd Work/Servers/OpenTaps

$ unzip opentaps-1.5.0.zip

The above command extracts the contents of the zip file.

Verify Sun JDK is the default Java version

The next important item is to check the java version installed on the machine by entering the following command.

$ java -version

Luckily for me the Sun JDK showed up as the configured version. If you get a different JDK installed as the version, then you can follow these steps to alter your configured version, and resume from here.

Setting up Postgresql environment

By default, Opentaps deploys with Derby database. I wanted to setup my deployment with Postgresql, so I followed the following steps. Assuming that you have Postgresql installed on your machine, open a terminal window and enter the following commands.

$ su postgres

$ createuser -W opentaps

System prompts you to enter the password, which I entered as opentaps. Next, answer the following questions.

Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n) n

Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n) y

Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n) y

Next we create the opentaps database

$ createdb opentaps

Here is my screenshot after running the above commands.

Now exit as the postgres user and log into psql as an opentaps user. Enter the following command (Note: You should no longer be logged in as the postgres user but as the original user you started the installation process with.)

$ psql -U opentaps -d opentaps

There! Our database user and database is created correctly.

Next step is to configure opentaps to connect to our new database as the opentaps database user.

Changing the database connections within opentaps to Postgresql

Changing the default database connection to Postgresql involves the following steps. Open a new terminal window and cd into the folder where opentaps 1.5 was installed.

$ cd Work/Servers/OpenTaps/opentaps-1.5.0/

$ cd framework/entity/config

$ gedit entityengine.xml

This launches the file in a text editor. Make the following changes in your text file.

Under the default node, make changes to change default datasource name from localderby to localpostnew, as shown below.

Within the same node, make additional changes for supporting multi-tenant model. Change datasource name for localderbytenant to localpostnewtenant, as shown below.

Here is a screen shot of my gedit screen after the changes.

This ensures that Now, navigate to localpostnew entry in the file.

I set the username password for postgresql connection

jdbc-driver="org.postgresql.Driver"

jdbc-uri="jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1/opentaps"

jdbc-username="opentaps"

jdbc-password="opentaps"

....

Now, copy the just edited localpostnew connection, and paste it again in the file. Rename the datasourcename to be localpostnewtenant as shown below.

Now that we have switched the default database provider from derby to postgresql, we need to carry out an additional step. By default the startup script for opentaps, would look at a schema and if no database tables needed to run the software are found, the installation program creates those tables. However, the startup scripts do not create populate even the initial data such as creating a login account for the administrator or an organization. We need to ensure that the initialization scripts create these datasets. To do so, we need to make a minor configuration entry to load the sample data. This is explained in the following steps.

First, navigate to the opentaps sub-folder from the installation root, by entering the following command.

$ cd opentaps

Next, we need to open the component-load.xml file for editing. I entered the following command at the terminal prompt.

$ gedit component-load.xml

The file is loaded in the editor. This is what the file looked like initially before I made any changes.

I made the following changes.

1. Uncommented the line to load pentaho BI component
2. Uncommented the line to load mycompany data

The modified file looks as follows:

Close and save the file and run ant with run-install option. OpenTaps ships with its own version of ant and that is the recommended version to be used.

$ ./ant run-install

Running this process took a little while and in the end everything was compiled.

In my case, I also ended up changing the default port from 8080 to 8084. In case you need to do the same, you can follow the steps listed in my post on the topic and resume back from here, once you are done.

Save and closing the files and running ./startofbiz.sh on the command prompt, starts the server in the background. To see the action of the scripts, one has to enter the following command on the terminal window

$ tail -f runtime/logs/console.log

Entering http://localhost:8084/opentaps produced the following screen on my machine.

The login details are:

Username: admin

Password: ofbiz

When I logged in for the first time, the login did not work. Here is my post on fixing this problem. If the login works, you should see the following screen.

By default, the admin user does not have access to the CRM module. To view the CRM modules, login with following credentials

Username: DemoSalesManager

password: crmsfa

This shows the following screen.

That's it, we have OpenTaps installed and working.