Chapter 02: Prerequisites

Overview

The ICAT software is written in the Java programming language with some additional tools written in Python. The application runs in a Java application server and uses a relational database to store its data. In this tutorial we will be installing the GlassFish Java application server and the MySQL database.

All of the commands on this page should be entered as the root user so let's change to the root user:

sudo -i

Install Java

ICAT requires at least JDK verion 1.8. Since ICAT is distributed online as a collection of .zip files, we will also need to install curl, wget and unzip (on the minimal linux operating system used for this tutorial - other OSes may have them pre-installed).

yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-headless curl wget unzip

Install and configure MySQL

We install MySQL, the MySQL java connector and some python dependencies.

yum install mysql-server mysql MySQL-python python-suds python-requests mysql-connector-java

Edit the MySQL configuration file at /etc/my.cnf. In the [mysqld] section, set the default storage engine to InnoDB.

[mysqld]
default_storage_engine = InnoDB

Start the MySQL database then run mysql-secure-installation to make it more secure. Enter the details when prompted. In this tutorial, we assume the database root user has the password 'pw'.

service mysqld start
mysql-secure-installation

Create the database and user for ICAT to use. For this tutorial, the ICAT database, the database user and the password are all 'icat'.

mysqladmin --user=root --password=pw create icat
mysql --user=root --password=pw --execute="CREATE USER 'icat'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'icat';"
mysql --user=root --password=pw --execute="GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'icat'@'localhost';"

Optionally install useful tools

You may like to install you favourite editor, the man program and a terminal screen multiplexer eg.

yum install vim man screen

Create the GlassFish user

The GlassFish Application Server should be run under its own account so let's make one.

useradd glassfish

For the rest of this tutorial, it is assumed that you will use the glassfish user account, unless stated otherwise, so let's switch to it.

su glassfish