Installing Crowd WAR Distribution

Below is a summary of the steps required to install the Crowd WAR distribution.

The standard Crowd installation guide tells you how to install the Crowd distribution, which includes Apache Tomcat. Instead, you may wish to deploy Crowd or CrowdID onto your own existing application server. For this purpose, we provide WAR (Webapp ARchive) distributions of the Crowd and CrowdID server applications.

Step 1. Check the System Requirements

Please check that your database and server are supported and make sure that all dependencies are installed as described below, otherwise Crowd will not run properly.

Supported Platforms

See Supported Platforms.

Dependencies

Step 2. Install Crowd WAR

Below is a summary of the Crowd WAR installation steps:

1. Download the Crowd WAR distribution from the Crowd download centre.
   You will find the WAR archives for the Crowd and the CrowdID applications by clicking the 'Show all' link. You will need to deploy each application separately. For the rest of these instructions, we assume you are deploying Crowd WAR.
2. Please check your unzip program before extracting the downloaded archive, as some unzip programs can cause errors — see the note on the Crowd installation front page.
3. Unzip the download archive into a directory of your choice. We'll call it CROWD-INSTALLATION in the rest of these instructions.
4. Specify your Crowd Home directory by editing the configuration file at CROWD-INSTALLATION/WEB-INF/classes/crowd-init.properties. The Crowd Home directory is where Crowd will store its configuration information. If you are using the embedded HSQL database, supplied for evaluation purposes, Crowd will also store its database in this directory. (Note however that the CrowdID database will be in the installation directory, not the Home directory.) To specify the Crowd Home directory:
   • Open the crowd-init.properties file. This is found at <crowd_install_directory>/crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/crowd-init.properties
   • Choose the appropriate line in the file, depending upon your operating system (see below).
   • Remove the # at the beginning of the line.
   • Enter the name of the directory you want Crowd to use as its Home directory. For example,

     • On Windows:

       crowd.home=c:/data/crowd-home
       

       Note: On Windows, make sure you use forward slashes as shown above, not backward slashes.

     • On Mac and UNIX-based systems:

       crowd.home=/var/crowd-home
       

       Important

       Please, ensure that the Crowd Home directory will not match the Crowd installation directory AND it is writable by the user executing the initialization script.

   • Save the crowd-init.properties file.
5. Deploy the Crowd files to your Tomcat application server. Depending upon your application server, you may need to zip up the WAR file again before deploying it. Place the CROWD-INSTALLATION directory or the WAR file into your application server's deployment directory. Please consult your application server's documentation on this point.
6. Configure a Crowd context in your Tomcat application server:

   • Create a file called crowd.xml that contains the following context:

     <Context path="/crowd" docBase="/path/to/atlassian-crowd-war-directory" reloadable="false"/>
     

   • Modify the '/path/to/atlassian-crowd-war-directory' in the above element to reflect the actual path to your Crowd WAR distribution. To avoid problems with your deployment, this should NOT be Tomcat's webapps directory. If you are installing Crowd on Windows, make sure that the paths you specify for the location of the WAR file and database are full paths including drive letters.
   • Place the file in Tomcat's conf/Catalina/localhost/ directory.
7. Create a database in your chosen database server and copy the database driver to your application server, as described in Connecting Crowd to a Database.
8. Optional: Modify Tomcat's server.xml to allow for a Unicode character set.
   If your user directory contains usernames or group names with Unicode characters, you need to modify your Tomcat distribution's conf/server.xml file. For example, you need to do this if your user directory allows for internationalized characters in usernames.

   • In your Tomcat distribution's conf/server.xml file, find the connector definition for your HTTP protocol. The connector definition looks very much like this:

     
     <Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
     maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
     enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
     connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true"/>
     

   • Add a URIEncoding="UTF-8" property to the connector:

     
     <Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
     maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
     enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
     connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>
     

     This setting affects all web applications

     Because you must define this property at the connector level, this setting will affect all web applications you have deployed under the connector. This should not adversely affect the other web applications, but please be aware of this fact. Crowd and CrowdID will run fine without this property set, but you will run into issues if a username or group contains internationalized characters.

9. Restart your application server.
10. Point a web browser at the IP address and port that your application server is running on (typically http://localhost:8080). The Crowd Setup Wizard will start.

RELATED TOPICS

• Supported Platforms
• Installing Crowd and CrowdID
• Running the Setup Wizard
• Configuring Crowd