Installing Railo 3 on Linux (CentOS): Part 1

In a previous post I alluded to how I learn by doing and generally go about it the "hard way". What I learn while sometimes being frustrating tends to settle in my brain and stay longer than if it was a piece of cake. It also allows me to then share with you what I learned and hopefully make life a little bit easier for you. Not everyone likes to do things the hard way.

I should also note that the most of the instructions I got from a PDF on installing Railo 2 on Linux, the rest came from contact with Railo support and help Viviotech.

Why CentOS

Before answering the why I should also answer the what. CentOS is a Community Enterprise Operating System. It is a Linux distribution and naturally is also free. So why CentOS then? Well honestly I didn't choose CentOS as such. I decided to get a VPS from Viviotech and it came pre-installed.

Before we start

I installed everything as root. I am going to make a couple of assumptions.

1. Apache is Installed and you will be using Apache as your web server.
2. typing "make" at the command prompt returns something like

   make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.

   , which means that make works.

Installing Railo

We are now ready to install Railo. The first thing you need to do is grab the latest release from the Railo website.

-bash-3.2# cd /opt
-bash-3.2# wget http://railo.ch/down.cfm?item=/railo/remote/download/3.0.0.005/server/unix/railo-3.0.0.005-resin-3.1.2-with-jre-linux.tar.gz

Once Railo is finished downloading you can unpack it using tar.

-bash-3.2# tar -xzf railo*.tar.gz
-bash-3.2# ls
railo-3.0.0.005-resin-3.1.2-with-jre-linux.tar.gz
railo-3.0.0.005-resin-3.1.2-with-jre-linux
-bash-3.2#

Good, now you have it unpacked you can go ahead and delete the archive file.

-bash-3.2# rm railo*.tar.gz

To make things easier you can also create a symbolic link to the Railo directory instead of trying to type in the whole thing.

-bash-3.2# ln -s railo-3.0.0.005-resin-3.1.2-with-jre-linux railo
-bash-3.2# ls
railo
railo-3.0.0.005-resin-3.1.2-with-jre-linux
-bash-3.2#

There are a few files we don't need in this install that are packaged by default so we can go ahead and delete them too.

-bash-3.2# rm -rf httpd.exe install-service.bat remove-service.bat setup.exe win32

You now have Railo installed and all unnecessary files removed you can now test to see if resin actually starts.

-bash-3.2# /opt/railo/bin/httpd.sh start
Resin/3.1.2 started -server ''.
-bash-3.2#

Congratulations Step 1 is complete. Opening a browser and pointing it to http://<ipOfLinuxBox>:8600/ should produce the standard Railo start page.

Conclusion

This may seem like a lot of work in comparison to the single click you need to install Railo on a Windows box, but this is *Nix machine and you have to come prepared to do stuff manually. In the next part we will make (compile) and install mod_caucho, which is an Apache module that allows interaction between Resin and Apache. Without this module you can't use Apache as your web server to serve cfml pages.