New install, not seeing or creating database tables

Help / Discuss
#1

Hi,

I ran xWiki from 2008-2014 before I left my last company. I’ve decided to set it up in my current organization, but it has become an extremely painful process.

I’m attempting to install the latest LTS version of xWiki (13.10.10) utilizing the war file and Apache Tomcat. (8.5.84) using OpenJDK 17 and MariaDB (10.5.16) on Rocky Linux 9.1. I’m using the Installation instructions provided on the xWiki site including the MariaDB setup.

I’ve started the application, then updated the configurations that exist in the WEB-INF and other expanded directories when the war file is expanded.

I then restart Tomcat, but xWiki does appear to even attempt to connect to MariaDB and create the tables. There isn’t any logs pertaining to databases or anything. No errors, nothing database related. There is nothing to point me in the direct direction to figure out what might be wrong. I’m at a loss trying to figure out what to check next as even searching Google providing anything relevant that I can determine as being relative to what I’m experiencing.

I’m sure it’s something simple that I’m missing, but I’ve tried to follow the install steps, step-by-step and even read through the config files to see if maybe I was missing something.

I’ve even wiped out the the xwiki expanded director in webapps and started afresh thinking maybe I just missed something and would try again.

My experience with xWiki’s versatility is why I really wanted to use it again, but I’ve never had this much difficulty just getting a wiki to even start. :frowning:

Any help would be highly appreciated or if there is a way to at least force xwiki to initialize the MariaDB database.

Dave

#2

Almost any issue should be visible from Tomcat log: can you post it?

#3

The only thing I see related to odbc is failing to unregister the driver at shutdown (currently, tomcat fails to stop on shutdown.sh call)

Here is a link to the catalina.out long on bpasteDOTnet.

Thank you for taking a look!

https://bpa.st/S5PQ

#4

Well, I hoped to find something more, maybe some XWiki expert could have a look.

For me, it looks that your server is stopped after one minute it finished starting (this happened twice):

08-Dec-2022 10:51:55.032 INFO [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start Server startup in 22098 ms
08-Dec-2022 11:53:52.806 INFO [main] org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.await A valid shutdown command was received via the shutdown port. Stopping the Server instance.

Actually you need to open an XWiki page to trigger its startup, I guess here it’s not starting at all :thinking:

You may want to rename the WAR from xwiki-platform-distribution-war-13.10.10.war to simply xwiki.war - but I don’t think that’s the culprit here.

#5

That is probably me shutting the server back down not long after starting it.

After I start tomcat. If I go to the URL, it just gets a “This site can’t be reached. It took too long to respond.” The webserver seems to accept the request, but never responds as I just get a spinning and the status bar says waiting for server…", but it never does.

I don’t see anything in the logs about the attempt either.

Hence why I’m finding it so difficult to troubleshoot. It’s not giving me any information to go on.

btw, I did rename the war file xwiki-13.10.10.war removing all the excess filename noise.

#6

There’s some other thing wrong then: Being deployed inside Tomcat, the latter should always respond to a request, you may of course get “Page not found” or other errors, but a missing response sounds strange.

Can you reach the other deployed Tomcat webapps, e.g. manager?

#7

watery, thanks for your help, but I finally found the problem. It seems one of my security engineers was testing a network security tool in this sandbox subnet that I’m using to set this up that was messing with the packets. (my infra guy forgot to mark this sandbox subnet in use, so nobody else was testing in it)

I attempted to load the url via wget from localhost and it was able to pull the index which told me something non-host related was causing it to fail.

#8

Hi,

Thanks for the log. Here’s the line

2022-12-08 10:51:40,016 [localhost-startStop-1] WARN  o.x.e.i.ServletEnvironment     - No permanent directory configured, fallbacking to temporary directory. You should set the "environment.permanentDirectory" configuration property in the xwiki.properties file.

You have to edit the xwiki.cfg file and add any path (or create the folder) where the temp files will be stored. For more details about this parameter(directory), you can read from instructions or as part of WAR installation.
In addition to that, the supported version of JDK for 13.10.10 will be Java 8 & Java 11. The JDK 17 can cause some errors.

#9

Actually, as indicated in the error, it’s xwiki.properties and what needs to be set is the permanent directory, as the temporary directory is fine by default.