Recently, while trying to install Artifactory on my Mac OS X machine, I encountered a weird error. Finding a solution was a bit tricky and took some time to figure it out.
Artifactory is basically an open source repository manager. I downloaded the latest current version v3.1.1.1. In this tutorial, we'll cover the easy method using
hot deployment on servlet container.
Note that Artifactory comes pre-bundled with it's war file which we can deploy onto Tomcat. Although it does come pre-loaded with it's own container, I wanted to deploy the war using Tomcat 7. Since I already have Tomcat 7 installed on my machine.
When I logged on to Tomcat manager and tried to deploy the Artifactory war, I got the generic looking error : FAIL - application at context path could not be started.
So I fired up the terminal and looked into the Tomcat Catalina logs and here's what I came across :
The error "Setting property 'disableURLRewriting' to 'true' did not find a matching property." was looking really strange. So I googled a bit and realised that
Artifactory needs JDK 1.7 to run. Refer
this forum for some insights.
Now since Mac machines come pre-loaded with Apple supplied Java 6, I was in a kind of a fix. I wondered what to do. Should I download and install Java 7 & uninstall Java 6?
However I was skeptical of uninstalling Java 6. Also, I was not quite sure about what overall impact it would have by uninstalling Java 6 altogether. Since I mentioned previously that Google Chrome does not work with 64-bit Java 7. I spent some time doing impact analysis but didn't quite reach a conclusive decision. A little bit of coffee did the trick :)
Now, here's the workaround.
Download the JDK 1.7 for Mac from this link. Now luckily I had the Eclipse IDE with Tomcat plugin ready. If you don't have this setup yet, I highly recommend working with the Eclipse IDE. Lots of customizations are possible.
Open Tomcat Preferences and and expand Java > Installed JRE from the left menu. Click Add. Now browse to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_51.jdk/Contents/Home. Describe it with some name like Jdk 1.7. Apply settings and don't exit the preferences as yet.
Make sure you only mention the path till Home. If you mention path further like .../Contents/Home/bin/java, you will see an error like "Target is not a JDK root. Java executable not found."
Check the screenshot for reference.
Now, scroll down the preferences' left pane and expand Tomcat > JVM Settings. From the drop down, select Jdk 1.7 that just defined above. So henceforth, Tomcat container will only be invoked using Jdk 1.7. If for any reasons, you have to invoke using Java 6, you can always choose Apple supplied Java 6 from this list. Check the screenshot for reference.
Now simply hit the Start Tomcat button. Bingo. Wait and watch the console till you see that Artifactory has started. Something like this :
###########################################################
### Artifactory successfully started (29.031 seconds) ###
###########################################################
Now, all you have to do is open browser to localhost:<listener-port-no>/artifactory. By default, tomcat's listener port is 8080. You can modify it if you want to.
In my next tutorial, I'll post about working with Artifactory & Maven repositories. Stay tuned folks.
