Turn Pentaho demo into a “server”
The standard Pentaho demo download is super quick and easy: there’s no installation and it just works. You double click start-pentaho.bat and then it’s running in http://localhost:8080.
However, sometimes you may want to share this demo with others. Roland Bouman has a nice blog entry on the specifics of how to change the demo install into a server.
I add the following line to my start-pentaho.sh to make the hostname changing transparent.
sed -i -e “s/http:\/\/.*:8080/http:\/\/`hostname -f`:8080/” jboss/server/default/deploy/pentaho.war/WEB-INF/web.xml
This allows one to move this “pentaho” to any system and it will startup properly with the http://actualhostname.company.com:8080 instead of http://localhost:8080. I download a new build of Pentaho on about a weekly basis in addition to preparing virtual machines and zipped installs for customers, partners. This little shortcut is an absolute must for me; it doesn’t make sense in the actual code release for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps someone else will find this little tidbit useful! Enjoy!