Running Activiti 5.4 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

This is an update for the Activiti 5.4 release!!! The boys and girls of the activiti.org development team must have had a busy schedule at the beginning of this year! 🙂 Pulling off monthly updates, they did a very good job again at the Activiti 5.4 release!!! What is Activiti??? Activiti is THE light-weight work-flow and Business Process Management platform targeted at business people, developers and sysadmins. In this “How to” I’ll try to explain how to install the Activiti 5.4 BPM tool demo on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using the terminal. Previous installations of Activiti are described here 5.0,5.1,5.2, 5.3.

[Update 16042011]

Extra, extra read all about it!!! Someone created a Virtual Machine based upon this article (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6294837/Activiti_5.4_Demo_VM).

Before you begin make sure your Ubuntu installation is up to date!!!

Install JDK, JRE, Ant and Eclipse at once as you can combine the separate installations, open a terminal window (Applications \ Accessories \ Terminal):

sudo add-apt-repository “deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner” && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts ant eclipse
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.24

Download Activiti:

wget http://activiti.org/downloads/activiti-5.4.zip
unzip activiti-5.4.zip

Install the Demo:

cd activiti-5.4/setup
ant demo.start

Open your browser and go to the following URL’s:

The Activiti Explorer is the web based application that provides access for all users of the system to manage task lists and execute process tasks.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-explorer/

The Activiti Probe is the web based application that offers admin and monitoring capabilities to keep Activiti Engine up and running.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-probe/

The Activiti Modeler is the web based BPMN 2.0 process modeling tool for business analysts.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-modeler/

The Activiti Cycle is the web based application that enables collaboration between business users, developers and IT operational people.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-cycle/

The Activiti KickStart is a web based component that makes building process solutions as easy as can be for non technical people.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-kickstart/

The Activiti Administrator is a new web based component that enables you to do some basic user administration.
http://localhost:8080/activiti-administrator/

If needed you can login using the following users:
kermit (pw: kermit)
fozzie (pw: fozzie)
gonzo (pw: gonzo)

Make Activiti start automatically after a reboot or shutdown…

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/activiti

Next copy the the next lines of code in the new file and save it:

#! /bin/sh

ACTIVITIPATH=/home/activiti/activiti-5.4/setup

case “$1” in
start)
echo “Starting Activiti from $ACTIVITIPATH”
cd /home/activiti/activiti-5.4/setup && ant h2.start tomcat.start

;;
restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
stop)
echo “Stoping Activiti from $ACTIVITIPATH”
cd /home/activiti/activiti-5.4/setup && ant h2.stop tomcat.stop
;;
*)
echo $”usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}”
exit 3
;;
esac
:

Now we’ll make the init script executable

sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/activiti

You can test the script by stopping and starting the server:

sudo /etc/init.d/activiti stop
sudo /etc/init.d/activiti start

And finally we’ll make the script start at boot time

sudo update-rc.d activiti defaults 90 10

Ready for happily using Actviti

exit

Enjoy your Activiti 5.4 installation on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS !!!

Suggestions for improving this article are welcome!

Please let me know and drop me a line.