This work is an initial prototype. It should not be considered stable until formally released as a part of DSpace |
Main Goals:
Potential features requiring further investigation:
The code is available from SVN prototype branch at: http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/sandbox/installer-prototype/
This code only includes a customized version of the normal 'dspace' Assembly module from Trunk (1.8.0-SNAPSHOT).
After downloading the code, run the following from [installer-prototype]/dspace/
directory:
mvn package -Pdspace-installer |
Currently, to keep the 'installer-prototype' SVN copy very minimal, I have not copied over an entire version of Trunk. The 'installer-prototype' only includes the 'dspace' Assembly directory. So, if you run into Maven build errors, you may first need to build Trunk, in order to ensure your local Maven repository ( |
After the build completes, you'll see a JAR installer created at [installer-prototype]/dspace/target/dspace-installer-1.8.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
You can execute this Installer by running the following from the [installer-prototype]/dspace/target/
directory:
java -jar dspace-installer-1.8.0-SNAPSHOT.jar |
After you run the installer, it will ask a series of questions around where you wish to install a copy of DSpace.
Currently, the Installer only works fully for a clean (fresh) install of DSpace. It is not fully functional in terms of updating or upgrading DSpace (some parts may work, but some may still be buggy). |
/main/main.jar
within the installer.jar file. In our case, /main/main.jar
calls the new dspace-install-api.jar file (see [installer-prototype]/dspace/src/assemble/installer-assembly.xml
for details)installer-build.xml
) which creates the DSpace installation directory similar to how it is created in past versions of DSpace. More notes on this below.[installer-prototype]/dspace/src/assemble/installer-assembly.xml
for details.The heart of this Installer is the new /dspace/dspace-install-api/
module. This module currently only includes a few new files:
org.dspace.install.Installer
- This is the main executable Installer class. Currently, it essentially just uses the Apache Ant API to call a custom Installer 'installer-build.xml' file (which is based off the default DSpace [installer-prototype]/dspace/src/main/config/build.xml
file). NOTE: Even though this installer uses the Ant API, Ant is not required to be installed on the local system. The Ant API is included within the Installer itself./src/main/resources/installer-build.xml
- This is the Ant Build file which actually tells Ant what it needs to do to actually perform the Install process.This section is just a note on implementation details that have unfortunately ended in failure.
Initially, I thought: "If I can embed Ant in the installer to actually create the [dspace] installation directory, why not go one step further and embed Maven, so that the Installer.jar just auto-builds DSpace for you via Maven". The main reason for potentially embedding Maven was to allow for a smaller Installer.jar overall (less duplication of JAR dependencies, for each of the various DSpace WARs), and to allow Maven to do what it does best (namely managing dependencies).
Unfortunately, that is not as simple as it may sound. To properly embed Maven into the Installer.jar, you'd need to do the following:
Although #2 and #3 above seem to be possible, there seems to be no easy way to do #1 (embedding a copy of an offline maven repo). Unfortunately, Maven does not come with a plugin which can successfully create an entire offline repository, and ensure all dependencies are written there. A few more notes on this:
The Conclusion: At least at this point in time, embedding Maven into an Installer is not really a plausible solution. We'll need to find a better way of avoiding an ever growing Installer.jar file (which is already rather large as some basic dependencies, e.g. dspace-api.jar, are duplicated 7 times in that one Installer.jar, once for each of the six webapps and once in [dspace]/lib).