I worked about two weeks on getting this to work, so I thought I'd share what I learned. Might be helpful for the next guy or gal who stumbles into this like I did. I'm very new at all of this stuff, and the docs aren't useful for the truly ignorant. I hope no one minds if I capture my epiphanies in this forum.
I accidentally set out to make ofbiz work in a shared hosting environment. I say accidentally because I didn't know that running it in a hosted environment would cause challenges. Here is what didn't work:
1. Mosso. They wouldn't give me shell access.
2. MediaTemple Grid Server. First of all, their sql server is slow. Second of all, I didn't have control over the ports. They basically ignored what ofbiz wanted to do in assigning ports.
Here's what I did to finally get it up and running:
1. Get a MediaTemple "Dedicated Virtual" hosting plan. It's $50 a month for the entry-level (base) server.
2. Upload the nightly trunk build (
Get it here).
3. Upload the Java SDK. (
Get it here).
4. Run the binary to unpack the Java SDK.
5. Enable root access using the MediaTemple control panel.
6. Edit /etc/profile to set up the PATH and JAVA_HOME variables. (
More info here).
7. MediaTemple uses Plesk, which uses port 8443. Ofbiz startup fails because that port is in use. Edit your /ofbiz-trunk/framework/base/config/ofbiz-contains.xml file to replace 8443 with something else. 8444 worked for me.
8. Run startofbiz.sh.
My experience so far (it's been about an hour of playing with it) is that it's pretty quick. I'm going to put it through some paces while I'm trying things out, and we'll see what performance does over time. Also, I'm sure I missed some stuff security- and other-wise, so i'm going to go back and clean that up. Finally, I'm going to switch off of derby and onto MySQL to see what that does for performance.
Good luck. No warranty. Your mileage may vary.
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