Detailed Installation Guide

Detailed installation guide

These instructions are for Linux. Click here for Windows installation instructions.

What does the installer do?

RESTx does not need to be installed as root, since it only performs a local 'install': Log files, PID files and dynamically created scripts, as well as .class files are only placed within the RESTx directory you created after downloading RESTx.

The installer examines the environment and prerequisites, performs the download of a few additional components, if needed and conducts basic sanity checks. It also assembles a few command and control scripts, which are used to start/stop the server, create and install new components, etc.

Prerequisites

RESTx requires at least a Java 6 JRE (Java Runtime Environment). If only a Java runtime is available (no Java compiler) then you should download our archive (RESTx-0.9.4.tar.gz or RESTx-0.9.4.zip), since it contains pre-compiled JAR files. However, if you download the sources from our archive or wish to develop your own Java components then a full Java 6 JDK with compiler is required.

The installer tries to find working installations of Java 6 as well as Jython 2.5.1. If Jython is not installed, it can perform the install for you.

Description of the automatic installation steps

Change into your RESTx installation directory and start the installer by typing:

% ./install.sh

These steps are then executed by the install script:

  1. Checks for the presence of a Java 6 JRE or JDK. Please make sure that at least the java executable is available in the path.
  2. Checks for the presence of a Jython 2.5.1 install. If you already have Jython installed you can either set the $JYTHON_HOME variable ahead of time to point to the Jython install directory or you can let the installer prompt you to enter the installation directory manually.
  3. If you do not yet have Jython installed, the installer can download and install it for you. Just say 'y' (yes) when prompted. You are then asked to specify the directory in which Jython should be installed. The installer suggests a local 'jython' directory within your RESTx install directory, which you can just accept by hitting enter. The official Jython 2.5.1 release is then downloaded from SourceForge, unpacked and installed.
  4. A few more checks are performed and if necessary and some additional Python packages are downloaded and installed from official Python package repositories.
  5. The restxctl script is created. This is the one script you need to start/stop the server, create and install new components, compile any Java components, etc. Try ./restxctl –help for more information. Also, please see the command and control section in our documentation page for more information.

Once the install is completed, you can start the server with: ./restxctl start