Installing Grouper Quickstart

Here are a few of my notes on the Internet2 Grouper project. I'm just attempting to get the quickstart up and running to get more of a feel for the application. First of all I grabbed a copy of Grouper 1.2.0RC2 quickstart and started following the instructions. After unpacking the archive and unpacking a clean copy of tomcat I copied across the tomcat-users.xml as I didn't have any existing users I wanted to keep.

After a quick scan of the grouper-ui/build.properties file I attempted to build the UI with ant ui and selected option 6 (war) however this fell over with an ugly ant error. Looking at the build.xml it seemed to be failing on the <propertyfile> task. A quick google and it seems this is an optional task, from previous experience I knew that the nice Ubuntu people split off the optional ant tasks into a seperate packages and sure enough that was missing on my system. An apt-get later and I had the ant build successfully running.

I copies the newly created WAR into Tomcat and started it up. 14 seconds later I could access the Grouper UI. After a delay I realised that all I had was a redirect to populateIndex.do and a blank page. Then I remembered a mention at the start of the document saying I needed an HSQL database to be running. As it turns out this is actually reasonably easy, just ant db at the toplevel of the quickstart. Then a trip back to the webserver and yey, a working grouper installation. Now time for a little play.