OrionSupport, Running Orion from a non-writeable directory

Running Orion from a non-writeable directory

Written by Joseph Ottinger

This guide gives an overview to running Orion from directories that are not writeable by the target user. You may want to do this if you download and extract Orion as root, then wish users on the system to run their own instances from the central installation.

In this document $CWD represents the current working directory.

Quick Reference Info

Orion uses $CWD as a temporary folder, and __needs__ write access to it.
$CWD/persistence/transaction.state is used by default, but can be overridden with the undocumented transaction-log="pathto/transaction.state" attribute of server.xml's element.
Relative paths in symlinked config files are interpreted to be relative to the original location (i.e. not the symlinked location) of the config file.

Configuring Orion

Beware! All relative paths given in config files will be relative to the config file itself, not the current directory.

First, copy server.xml, application.xml, data-sources.xml, jms.xml, and rmi.xml to a config directory owned by the user. Nothing beyond your normal data-sources need be put in data-sources.xml. Any config files that are not copied must be referenced with absolute paths (or paths relative to the new location of the config file).

server.xml

If $CWD/persistence is not where you want a transaction.state file, you need to use the undocumented transaction-log="pathto/transaction.state" attribute of server.xml's element. If you're putting this in a new directory, make sure you create it before you run Orion.
You need to set the paths for rmi-config, log file, global-application, and global-web-app-config. If you do not give an absolute path name, all paths are interpreted as relative to $CWD 1.1 application.xml
Set persistence path to somewhere you have write access to
Set the principals path to your principals.xml file - note that if you set an invalid path, Orion throws a NullPointerException on startup in builds <= 11157
Set the log and data-sources.xml paths

jms.xml

The log file path should be set

rmi.xml

The log file path should be set

Running Orion

Since $CWD is used as a temporary folder for generating and compiling CMP and JSP .java files, Orion must by started from a folder the user has write access to like so:

java -jar /usr/local/orion/orion.jar -config configs/server.xml

The default search for server.xml is $CWD/config/server.xml so if you've called your config directory that, there's no need to even pass Orion its -config flag.