Beginners question: how do I install XWiki (WAR or DEB, Oracle RDBMS)

Thanks Syn!
I somehow missed the fact, that WAR is a simple archive which I might extract everywhere. So I only took the missing hibernate.cfg.xml from there, corrected it to use my Oracle Instant client and it worked.
For some reason I had to place the ojdbc6.jar into /usr/share/tomcat7/lib/ rather than /usr/lib/xwiki/WEB-INF/lib/ which gave me the well known “NullPointerException at HqlSqlWalker”…

For everyone that faces the same problem, here are my steps to get it running with Oracle instant client:

  • install Java 8 and configure APT sources up to “Second Step : Complete installation” in the Installation using Debian (.DEB) packages
  • install Oracle Instant Client (actually extract it to /opt/oracle/instantclient)
  • create the DB user as outlined in Oracle Installation
  • issue ‘sudo apt-get install xwiki-tomcat7-common’ (or choose tomcat8 if available for your distribution)
  • you may run into the problem, that Tomcat 7 does not find the Java 8 home, so explicitly set JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle in the config file /etc/default/tomcat7
  • increase Tomcat memory in this same file as described in the “Tomcat Usability Section”
  • create the file /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/setenv.sh and set it executable with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
export PATH=${PATH}:/opt/oracle/instantclient/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/opt/oracle/instantclient/

  • (re-)start Tomcat: ‘sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart
  • if the installation aborted on the first attempt, be sure to complete if with ‘sudo apt-get install -f
  • finally extract the missing hibernate.cfg.xml from the currect WAR archive to /etc/xwiki/ and configure the Oracle section. I used the simple SID to name the database source rather than the global full name:

<property name=“connection.url”>jdbc:oracle:thin:@[ServerIP]:1521:[MySID]</property>

Now I can go on finishing the installation wizard by accessing:
http://[TomcatServerURL]:8080/xwiki/

Thanks again,
Sven