Requirements

Before going into details on Knowage installation, it is necessary to check if certain requirements are satisfied. We start to distinguish between the certified environments and the compatible ones. The first are those where check tests take place. The latter are those environments technically compatibles but where integration tests are not executed.

Operating systems

The following Operating Systems (OS) are those ones which suit with Knowage platform.

Table 1 Certified environments
Certified Environments
Operating System Version
CentOS 6 64-bit
Windows 7
Table 2 Compatible environments
Compatible Environments
Operating System Version
RHEL Red Hat Enterprise 6.4
Ubuntu 16 LST,18 LST
Windows server 2012, 2008

Disk usage

The Knowage installation requires 2 GB of available space on file system. This space does not include the space relative to the data and the metadata storage.

Java environment

The enviroment in which Knowage will be installed must include a JDK 1.8 installation. Be sure that the JDK component is successfully installed and that the environment variable JAVA_HOME is properly configured. The steps to configure it depend on the OS.

Linux

Define the JAVA_HOME variable inside the users’ file .bash_profile used in the installation process

Listing 1 Instructions to set the JAVA_HOME variable for Linux environment.
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export JAVA_HOME=<root path of the Java installation>
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_60/
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Windows

Define the JAVA_HOME variable and PATH in the section “Environment variables” which can be reached from the “System”.

../_images/image711.png

Fig. 1 Setting the path for the JAVA_HOME variable for Windows

Application server

The following lists the supported application servers:

Table 3 Supported application servers
Support type Application Server Version
Certified Apache Tomcat 8.5.37

For each application server installation please refer to its official documentation.

Tomcat 8.5

In the following we will refer to Tomcat installation folder as TOMCAT_HOME.

Linux

It is recommended to create a proper user for the execution of Tomcat. We state the main steps to follow for this purpose.

  • Create the Tomcat user.

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    useradd -m tomcat
    passwd <password for the tomcat user>
    
  • Install the Tomcat using the Tomcat user. Remeber to define the TOMCAT_HOME variable.

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    export TOMCAT_HOME=<path of the installation Tomcat root folder >
    
  • Be sure that the Tomcat uses the JDK 1.8: usually the Tomcat settings are defined in the TOMCAT_HOME/bin/setenv.sh file, therefore if the TOMCAT_HOME/bin/setenv.sh file does not exit, the user must create it and insert it in the content as shown below. Note that CATALINA_PID contains the ID of the Tomcat process and it kills the process if needed.

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    export CATALINA_PID=<root folder of the Tomcat installation>/logs/tomcat-knowage.pid
    export JAVA_HOME=<root folder of the JDK 1.8 installation>
    
  • Modify the TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh file to force the shut down of the application in case of hanging:

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    exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" stop -f "$@"
    

Windows

It is recommended to install Tomcat as a service. Documentation is available at https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/windows-service-howto.html.

Database schema for metadata

Knowage uses a schema to manage metadata, that is all those information required for its operation. These concern the configuration, the users and the analytical documents. It is possible to use the following DBMSs for the creation of this schema.

Table 4 Exploitable DBMSs for the metadata schema creation
Support Type DBMS Version
Certified Oracle 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Certified MySql 5.6
Certified PostgreSQL 8.2, 9.1
Certified MariaDB 10.1, 10.2, 10.3

Therefore, a schema must be available. It can be reached through the JDBC protocol by the Knowage installation server; such a schema will be called metadata DB in the following. Observe that Knowage includes all the DDL for table creation.

Database schema for data

A schema for data must be also available. It can be queried through Knowage and can be reached through the JDBC protocol by the Knowage installation server; such a schema will be called data DB in the following.

SlimerJS requirements

Knowage includes a standalone edition of SlimerJS 0.9 to export some contents to PDF and image files. Usually SlimerJS runs out-of-the-box on Windows, but requires OS-dependent libraries on Unix-like operating systems.

Troubleshooting missing requirements may be difficult on Unix-like operating systems. Executing SlimerJS manually with debug option may help to investigate further:

Listing 2 Executing SlimerJS with debug option via Xvfb
xvfb-run ./slimerjs --debug=yes