This page last changed on Aug 18, 2008 by smaddox.

This page contains information about the important directories and files to be aware of when configuring Crowd.

On this page:

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When configuring an application to work with Crowd, you will be interested in the crowd.properties file.

The Crowd Home Directory

The Crowd Home directory is where Crowd will store its configuration information. If you are using the embedded HSQL database, supplied for evaluation purposes, Crowd will also store its database in this directory.

The location of this directory is specified in the crowd-init.properties file described below. You can set the location during installation.

Crowd's System Information screen shows the location of your Crowd Home directory.

Important files in the Crowd Home directory, listed here and described below:

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The crowd.cfg.xml File

This file stores the configuration information for the Crowd Administration Console application:

  • License information
  • Server ID
  • Database configuration properties
  • Setup phase reached.

The contents of this file is automatically generated when you run the Crowd Setup Wizard.

The file is located in the Crowd Home directory, described above.

Here's an example of the content of crowd.cfg.xml, when the embedded HSQL database was specified at setup:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<application-configuration>
  <setupStep>complete</setupStep>
  <setupType>initial</setupType>
  <buildNumber>212</buildNumber>
  <properties>
    <property name="crowd.server.id">AWWP-AWWP-AWWP-AWWP</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.acquire_increment">1</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period">100</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">15</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements">0</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.min_size">0</property>
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.timeout">30</property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class">org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.password"></property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:hsqldb:C:Crowd/database/defaultdb</property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.username">sa</property>
    <property name="hibernate.dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect</property>
    <property name="hibernate.setup">true</property>
    <property name="license.hash">MnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnmpMnnm</property>
    <property name="license.message">nQQuwnpnROOOrQMrppvxRqROoprPnQomnTtxSsuXstWwSxpOrrMsmvUUnnuprorommmmmUUnnuprorommmmmUU1qiXppfXkUUnmmmm</property>
  </properties>
</application-configuration>

The Crowd Installation Directory

This is the directory into which the downloaded Crowd application has been unzipped during installation.

Important files in the Crowd Installation directory, listed here and described below:

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The crowd-init.properties File

This is where you specify your Crowd Home directory (described above). You can set the location during installation.

The crowd-init.properties file is located in the Crowd Installation directory at {CROWD_INSTALL}\crowd-webapp\WEB-INF\classes\crowd-init.properties

The file content looks something like this before it has been customised:

## You can specify your crowd.home property here or in your system environment variables.

# On Windows-based operating systems, uncomment the following 
# line and set crowd.home to a directory Crowd should use to 
# store its configuration.
# NOTE: use forward slashes instead of backward slashes

#crowd.home=c:/data/crowd-home

# On Unix-based operating systems, uncomment the following
# line and set crowd.home to a directory Crowd should use to 
# store its configuration.

#crowd.home=/var/crowd-home

The crowd.properties File

The crowd.properties file contains application configuration settings. Each application integrated with Crowd will have a corresponding crowd.properties file. See Adding an Application.

For more information, refer to The crowd.properties File. See also Passing the crowd.properties File as an Environment Variable.

The build.properties File

This configuration file stores various deployment properties of Crowd and the 'demo' application.

The file is located at the root of your Crowd Installation directory (described above).

The default build.properties file will look similar to the following:

# Modify the attributes of this file to quickly adjust the deployment values of Crowd.

# The Hibernate database dialect to use.
hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect

# The Hibernate transaction factory to use.
hibernate.transaction.factory_class=org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory

# The http port you wish to run crowd from, ie: http://localhost:8095/crowd
crowd.tomcat.connector.port=8095

# Tomcat requires a unique port for shutdown
crowd.tomcat.shutdown.port=8020

# Crowd context root
crowd.url=http://localhost:8095/crowd

# Demo context root
demo.url=http://localhost:8095/demo

# OpenID server context root
openidserver.url=http://localhost:8095/openidserver
Parameter Description
hibernate.dialect This parameter controls the database dialect the Hibernate persistence system will use when executing commands versus your database server.
hibernate.transaction.factory_class This parameter controls the transaction factory to use when executing transactions at run-time:
Hibernate provides two generic options, additional application server specific options are available:
  • org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransactionFactory delegates to database (JDBC) transactions (default).
  • org.hibernate.transaction.JTATransactionFactory delegates to JTA (if an existing transaction is under way, the work performed is done in that context. Otherwise a new transaction is started).
crowd.url The path and port for the root of the Crowd Administration Console web-application.
demo.url The path and port for the root of the Crowd demo web-application
openidserver.url The path and port for the root of the CrowdID web-application

The build.xml File

This is an Ant script that loads properties from the build.properties configuration file.

The file is located at the root of your Crowd Installation directory (described above).

If configuring Crowd and/or the demo application to run on a port and context path other than the default, you will need to run the command  build.sh  (or  build.sh) against the  build.xml  configuration file. This process will then edit all of the necessary Crowd configuration files for your deployment.

The sample output from running build.xml will look similar to the following: 

shamid@mocha:~/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0$ ./build.sh
Buildfile: build.xml

init:

assistant:
 Changing Tomcat's connector port to 8095
 Changing Tomcat's shutdown port to 8020
Configuring the Crowd Console
Copying crowd.properties to: crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes
Copying 1 file to /home/shamid/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0/crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes
Configuring the Crowd hibernate configuration
Updating the HibernateDialect and TransactionFactory in crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/jdbc.properties
Updating property file: /home/shamid/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0/crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/jdbc.properties
Configuring the demo application
Renaming and copying demo.properties to: demo-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/crowd.properties
Copying 1 file to /home/shamid/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0/demo-webapp/WEB-INF/classes
Configuring the OpenID server application
Renaming and copying openidserver.properties to: crowd-openidserver-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/crowd.properties
Copying 1 file to /home/shamid/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0/crowd-openidserver-webapp/WEB-INF/classes
Configuring the OpenID hibernate configuration
Updating the HibernateDialect and TransactionFactory in crowd-openidserver-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/jdbc.properties
Updating property file: /home/shamid/atlassian-crowd-1.1.0/crowd-openidserver-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/jdbc.properties

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds
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Document generated by Confluence on Aug 27, 2008 20:21