Installing Yellowfin Into an Existing Application Server

Introduction

Yellowfin can be installed into an existing Application Server, such as OAS or an existing Tomcat server if desired. The process is fairly straight-forward except for a couple variations from the normal installation process. Installing in this way is a good choice if you already have hosted web applications and you'd like to centralize administration.

For the purposes of this article, I performed this process on a headless Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit server using Tomcat 8.5.12, although the process won't differ much across platforms. The following process assumes you have a working Application Server to deploy Yellowfin into.

Process

Download the Yellowfin full installer onto the server you wish to deploy Yellowfin on.
You can download the installers for your platform here.
Run the installer as you would in a normal installation.
Browse to the Yellowfin installation directory and locate the war file yellowfin.war.
At this point you can copy your war file for deployment into your Application Server. This will be dependent on your application server.
- For Tomcat, I copied the war file into the Tomcat webapps directory, at /webapps/ and made sure to update ownership of the file to the tomcat user and group.
- For OAS, I used the web GUI designed for application deployment.
Prior to finishing deployment it will be necessary to update the file path of your web-jsps.xml file in the web.xml contained in your war file. This can be done before or after deployment. I chose to do this after.
Edit the file /WEB-INF/web.xml and update the file path in the
tag to reflect the new web-jsps.xml location. In my case I had to change it to /webapps/yellowfin/WEB-INF/web-jsps.xml.
Edit your Tomcat context.xml, located in
/conf/context.xml, to allow the parsing of external web.xml files by editing your
tag as follows:
```
<Context xmlBlockExternal="false"> 
```
Restart your deployed Yellowfin application or your Application Server.
Enjoy Yellowfin!