Alfresco in the cloud: how to deploy it step-by-step

This is a step-by-step instruction on deploying Alfresco, enterprise content management system, into Jelastic cloud so you can use it as an inexpensive hosted CMS. Jelastic can natively run any Java application with no code changes required so the procedure below is applicable to most Java applications.

Scroll down to see a video version of the same procedure.

1. Create the environment

1. Go to jelastic.com and sign up if you haven’t done it yet or log in with your Jelastic credentials by clicking the Sign In link on the page.

2. Click Create environment to set up a new environment in Jelastic.

3. In the Environment topology window, select Tomcat 7 as your application server, Maria DB as the database you want to use and type your environment name, for example, Alfresco, and click Create.

In a minute your environment with both Tomcat and Maria DB will be created and appears in the environments list.

2. Upload Java package

1. Go to Alfresco web-site and download community edition by clicking TRY Alfresco Enterprise Online or Download, click Download Now button for the Document Management.                                                            

2. Click Individual Components and Custom Installs.

3. Download the latest version of ZIP archive of Alfresco community edition.                                     

4. Extract files from this archive and navigate to Alfresco WAR file at alfresco-community-3.4.dweb-serverwebapps.

5. Upload your Java package to the Deployment manager.

6. Deploy it to the created environment.

3. Configure database

1. Once the deployment is finished, click Open in browser button for Maria DB.

2. When you created the environment, Jelastic sent you an email with credentials to the database. Create an account and the database with the application using these credentials.

4. Configure Alfresco

1. Click Config button for Tomcat. 

2.Navigate to webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco-global.properties.sample.

3. Rename this file to  alfresco-global.properties, so it becomes the production configuration.

4. Uncomment a part of file which sets database credentials.

5. Make the database driver and URL to point to your database server.

5. Upload required JAR libraries

1. Upload mysql-connector library to the Tomcat’s lib folder.

2. Restart Tomcat.

3. Navigate to the Log tab to make sure you  that the deployment was successful and you are ready to open the environment in web browser.

And here is a video version of the same procedure: