LiveRebel Installation and Configuration Walkthrough
LiveRebel Installation and Configuration Walk-through
0. Installation
1. Running LiveRebel Control Center
2. First Login
3. Server Management
4. Application Management
5. Rolling out the new application version
6. Configuration
6.1 Users
6.2 Licensing
6.3 Failover
7. Questions and Help.
If you are looking for LiveRebel 1.* documentation, please click here.
0. Installation
To install LiveRebel, first download the distribution from the download page. The distribution is a regular ZIP archive, after extracting the archive you will get a folder with the following layout:
- auto-import is the folder to import new versions of applications from.
- bin includes the scripts for running the server and the command-line administration tool.
- changelog.txt contains list of changes to previous releases.
- data is used for LiveRebel server database. Created on first run.
- lib contains the LiveRebel server JAR files.
- logs includes various logs to help you when you run into trouble. Created on first run.
- readme.txt contains initial instructions for running the server.
1. Running LiveRebel Control Center
To start the server let’s take a look in the bin directory:
Gnu/Linux, MacOS:
For the fist time you can start LiveRebel Command Center by executing this command ./lr-command-center.sh run
Microsoft Windows:
Start ./lr-command-center.cmd run to launch the LiveRebel Command Center application. If you want to install LiveRebel Command Center as a Windows service then run the lr-as-service.cmd script.
Through the Web:
The Command Center is a modern web application for managing your LiveRebel. installation. You can access it with your browser by navigating to https://localhost:9001/ or https://$yourhostname:9001/
Please note that some browsers can complain about the SSL certificate we are using. It’s self-signed, but we want to assure you that your data is secured.
2. First Login
When you log into LiveRebel Command Center for the first time you will need to register your LiveRebel copy …
… and create the first user. Both processes are trivial, just fill the forms and continue.
Now, your version of LiveRebel is set up and you can start managing your servers and applications. You are taken to the empty servers page where you can start adding your first server.
3. Server Management
Click on Add Server and follow the instructions on the next screen to install LiveRebel Agent:
When you are ready, click on “I’ve followed these steps and restarted the server” button see your server(s):
Done! Fast and easy!
4. Application Management
Click on Add application to select an app. If it is empty, you need to add a liverebel.xml configuration file to your application archive and then redeploy it.
The liverebel.xml configuration file is used by LiveRebel to manage the application versioning and should be present in every application archive, including deployed applications managed by LiveRebel and archives uploaded to the LiveRebel console.
The content of the configuration file includes the name and version of the application archive like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <application> <name>RebelChat</name> <version>1.0</version> </application>
This configuration file should be put in the WEB-INF/classes directory of your WAR.
If you don’t have an application or don’t feel like configuring it you can download the demonstration RebelChat application.
Deploy this RebelChat application to your application server. If the server is properly configured RebelChat version 1.0 should appear under the Applications tab.
Choose the application and version you want to deploy and click on the “Deploy now” button:
You can click on application name and LiveRebel Command Center will take you to application screen, where you can manage application versions or make application updates.
5. Rolling out the new application version
Now that LiveRebel is configured and both the Command Center and your application server with the LiveRebel agent are running, it’s time to try and update an application.
First, let’s visit the application and check how it looks (we will use the RebelChat application), you can just click “View” link in Liverebel Command Center.
It will open a new browser tab/windows with the requested application:
Navigate to the Applications tab and you should see the RebelChat application (or your own if you configured some other application). For RebelChat case we also provide couple of versions that you can test for updates, you can get them here:
Just put the new version in the same folder like the old one and refresh the Control Center. The new version is automatically detected and we can deploy it right away.
Let’s update our application. Click on “Deployment” button to see the current version.
Click on “Update all” to update it:
When you select the new version and if there are some errors and/or warnings that you should know about the Command Center will show you a link, that opens a popUp like that:
Select “Server(s)”, “Version”, Select “HotPatching” as an update mode and hit “Update now” button.
Voila!
Clicking the Back button will lead you back to the RebelChat application view where you can see now that version 1.1 is activated.
Now lets can take a look at the application again. Go to your browser with opened RebelChat application and refresh the page.
You can see that now it is a standard version of RebelChat: style of the application is changed, chat supports now /nick command, etc.
From the RebelChat application view you can rollback this change and in a few mouse clicks activate version 1.0 again.
Enjoy!
See TOC
6. Configuraion
LiveRebel Command Center comes with powerful configuration tool, that can be accessed by clicking the Configuration tab:
6.1 Configuring Users
The Users sub-menu gives you the right to manage all users and give them different rights. You can create one administrator to hold all of the rights and to create a couple of users for some routines.
6.2 Configure Licenses
From here you can manage your licenses. Every first install of LiveRebel comes with 90 day valuation license. Click here to learn more about getting a license.
6.3 Configuring Failover Server
Failover servers are backup copies of the LiveRebel Command Center that can be used to manage application updates when the primary server is unavailable. You can activate this server as a failover server for another LiveRebel Command center.
7. I still have some questions
Feel free to visit our help center using your LiveRebel Control Center.
