Step1 Copy the PhixFlow Webapp into Tomcat

To install the PhixFlow web application into Tomcat:

Copy $RELEASE/webapps/phixflow to $TOMCAT/webapps/phixflow

Linux

Make sure that the file ownership is set correctly for the installed webapps:

sudo chown -R tomcat:tomcat $TOMCAT/webapps/phixflow

Step 2 Create Configuration Files

Copy the following example configuration files and, where required, update them for your system.

The files are in $TOMCAT/webapps/$WEBAPP/WEB-INF/classes

phixflow-instance.xml

Copy the example file phixflow-instance.xml.example to phixflow-instance.xml.

phixflow-instance.xml identifies the webapp instance in a resilient configuration and sets whether the instance is active on startup.

phixflow-datasource.xml

The PhixFlow webapp must be configured to provide user access to the PhixFlow database. In phixflow-datasource.xml, enter an alias username and password. The actual username and password are stored in an encrypted keystore; see Configure a Keystore for Database Credentials.

Copy phixflow-datasource.xml.<database>.example to phixflow-datasource.xml.
Edit the properties for <bean id="dataSource"... (shown below).
Enter the alias for the database:
- username
- and password.

Sections on this page

<property name="url">
	<value>CONNECTION-STRING</value>
</property>
<property name="username">
	<value>ALIAS-USERNAME</value>
</property>
<property name="password">
	<value>ALIAS-PASSWORD</value>
</property>

4. Replace the temporary values with:

USERNAME: the database user's name.
PASSWORD: the database user's password.
CONNECTION-STRING: this depends on the database platform, and is one of:

Oracle: jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:1521:phixflow

Oracle (> 12c with PDB containers): jdbc:oracle:thin:@hostname:1521/phixflow

SQL Server: jdbc:sqlserver://hostname\myservice;databaseName=phixflow

MariaDB: jdbc:mariadb://localhost/phixflow

These strings cover most cases of connecting to PhixFlow's own database. For information about how connection strings are constructed for the various database platforms supported by PhixFlow; see Database URLs.

phixflow-secret.xml

If you have not already done so Configure a Keystore for Database Credentials. Use phixflow-secret.xml to specify the keystore details.

Copy the example file phixflow-login.xml.example to phixflow-login.xml.

You will use this file if you need to configure PhixFlow to authenticate users’ usernames and passwords against an external domain, or Active Directory, or a SAML Single Sign-on server, such as the Active Directory Federation Services server. For more information, see the pages in the User Administration topic.

logback.xml

Copy the example file logback.xml.example to logback.xml.

The logback.xml file controls detailed event/error logging on the server. You only need to change this file:

to rename the log file if you have multiple PhixFlow instances; see Renaming the Log File, below.
to change the logging level when troubleshooting; see Server Log Files
as requested by PhixFlow Support.

Changes to logback.xml take effect within a one or two minutes. You do not need to restart the Tomcat servlet.

phixflow-logging.xml

Copy the example file phixflow-logging.xml.example to phixflow-logging.xml.

The phixflow-logging.xml file contains a list of directories that contain log files, and is used when downloading log files from the GUI. You only need to change this file as requested by PhixFlow Support.

Using Your own Logo in PhixFlow

Optionally, you can configure PhixFlow to display your own company logo. The logo must be a vector graphic .svg file with the name customerLogo.svg (case sensitive). Add the file to $TOMCAT/webapps/phixflow/gui/images/

Step 3 Restart Tomcat

Whenever you make changes in $TOMCAT/webapps/phixflow, remember to restart Tomcat, so that the changes are used.

Linux

If you have followed PhixFlow's recommended installation for PhixFlow, you can use the commands:

sudo systemctl stop tomcat
sudo systemctl start tomcat

Create PhixFlow file system

Strictly speaking, all of the steps in this section are options - you can configure the file system as you wish, providing that you update System Configuration with the paths you have set up. However, this is PhixFlow's recommended set up, and is widely used across many PhixFlow installations.

This section also includes instructions for creating a soft-link from the PhixFlow file system area to Tomcat. It is recommended that you create this because it is needed to support creation of most applications in PhixFlow. In the commands below, a soft link is created from $TOMCAT/webapps/phixflow/datalink → [PhixFlow file system]/phixflow/datalink. This allows application designers to add image and template files to the PhixFlow file system rather than under Tomcat. Note that the Upgrading PhixFlow instructions include a step for re-creating this link when upgrading PhixFlow.

Windows

Create folders as below that are accessible by the user running Tomcat (WEBAPP is the name of the installed PhixFlow, often just "phixflow"):

C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP
C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/upload
C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/temp
C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/import
C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/export
C:/app/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/datalink

Create the soft-link in a CMD or Powershell session:

mklink /D C:\app\tomcat\webapps\$WEBAPP\datalink C:\app\phixflow\data\$WEBAPP\datalink

Linux

export WEBAPP=[webapp name, e.g. phixflow]
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/upload
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/temp
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/import
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/export
sudo mkdir /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/datalink
sudo chown -R tomcat:tomcat /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP
cd /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP; sudo chmod g+w upload temp export datalink
sudo ln -sf /opt/phixflow/data/$WEBAPP/datalink /opt/tomcat/webapps/$WEBAPP/datalink

Either do Minimum Set-up After Installation on page Administration, or instruct the people you are delivering this to to complete these steps immediately

Multiple PhixFlow Webapps

To install multiple instances of PhixFlow on a single server, complete the installation steps above to create a first PhixFlow instance. Then install a further instance:

Create a second database user to hold the data for the new instance.
Copy the PhixFlow web application into the Tomcat again:

cp $RELEASE/webapps/phixflow to $TOMCAT/webapps/<mywebapp>

where <mywebapp> is the name of your new instance.

Remember to set up a separate user and schema in the database for the new PhixFlow instance and to configure phixflow-datasource.xml with the user, password and connection-string.

Renaming the Log File

By default, the settings in logback.xml send log messages from all PhixFlow webapps to the same log file, phixflow.log. When you have multiple instances, it is then not clear which webapp has generated which messages. In this case, we recommend that you change each webapp to log into a separate log file.

For each webapp, edit the logback.xml file and change the name of the log file to something that uniquely identifies which webapp it has been generated by - we recommend phixflow_webappName.log (where webappName should be changed to the name of the webapp). This needs to be added in two places:

on line 3: messages are re-directed initially to logs/phixflow_webappName.log
on line 6: messages re-directed after daily rollover to logs/phixflow_webappName.yyyy-MM-dd.log.

logback.xml

... 
 <appender name="FILE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
    <file>logs/phixflow_webappName.log</file>
    <rollingPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.TimeBasedRollingPolicy">        
      <!-- daily rollover -->
      <fileNamePattern>logs/phixflow_webappName.%d{yyyy-MM-dd}.log</fileNamePattern>
      <maxHistory>30</maxHistory>
    </rollingPolicy>
    <encoder>
      <pattern>%date %level [%thread] %logger{10} [%file:%line] %msg%n</pattern>
    </encoder>
  </appender>
...

Install the PhixFlow Webapp