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.

Download and Install Pentaho Community Edition Installation on Ubuntu 12.04

In this post, we are going to install Pentaho Community Edition on a Ubuntu 12.04 Edition. Pentaho is an open source Business Intelligence server. Business Intelligence or BI, as many of readers might know, is a set of technologies to allow executives and operators make sense of the data collected within an organization. It typically tries to collate data from different transactional and operational systems into a specialized data model such that data can be sliced and diced, and aggregated and analyzed through visual and other means to derive actionable intelligence for business decisions.

The details on the Community edition are available at http://community.pentaho.com/projects/bi_platform/



























The first step is obviously going to be to access and install the BI server.We can access the Community Edition by accessing the following URL. At the time of writing this post, the latest version available was 4.5, which is available from the following location.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/4.5.0-stable/

I downloaded biserver-ce-stable.zip (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/4.5.0-stable/).

Downloading the BI Server

To download this 450 MB file, it took a long time as I was travelling at the time, and did not have access to a high speed connection. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I resorted to using Linux's wget command to download the file.

After many hours on the slow connection, finally the download was complete.

Installation Steps

To install the file, navigate to the location where the file was downloaded and unzip the file.

The BI Server includes an Embedded Tomcat instance. We can navigate to the folder in a command window and start the Tomcat instance by entering the following command.

Next step is to make the shell files executable by entering the following command.

> chmod a+x *.sh

Next step is to ensure that the embeddable Tomcat server is executable. For, doing that navigate to the bin directory of the embedded Tomcat server and entering the command to make the shell files executable.

> cd tomcat/bin

> chmod a+x *.sh

Last but not the least, we need to make sure that the embedded Tomcat instance can execute on the defauly port. For this we need to edit and change the Tomcat port, that is configured in the ./tomcat/conf/server.xml file. Since I already have one Tomcat instance configured on port 8080, I needed to change the embedded Tomcat port to 8082.

Change the port to 8082 in the appropriate connector entry. Also, we may need to change the shutdown port, which is 8005 by default, to something like 8007.

Finally, we can save the file and close it. Now, we can go back start Pentaho server by entering the following command.

> ./start-pentaho.sh

Now, we can access the Pentaho BI Server on the browser by entering the url http://ub1204.arthgallo.com:8082/pentaho

Now, we can login by entering the following credentials.

Administrator login: joe/password

Entering the password, we can see the following home page for Pentaho BI Server

That's it, we have Pentaho Community Edition installed. By the way, I soon learnt that the Community Edition Pentaho does not ship with a Dashboard, which was the purpose of the whole exercise. That is available through an extension, setting up which I have described in the a future post (http://opendesignarch.blogspot.com/2012/12/install-community-dashboard-tools-on.html).

All the best!