Installation guide on CentOS 7

These are instructions for flex.bi private 3.0 and later. For earlier version please contact our support.

Requirements

Private flex.bi installation is supported on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
Java SE 7 or Java SE 8 should be installed (you can use openjdk).
MySQL (version 5.x), PostgreSQL (version 9.x), MS SQL (version 2008 or later) and Oracle (version 11g or later) are supported as Private flex.bi database.

Our default setup

We have chosen Linux CentOS 7 as our default server platform and MySQL/MariaDB as a database engine so these instruction apply for this specific setup.

However it is possible to run flex.bi also on older CentOS, Redhat as well as other distributions of Linux by adjusting the available software, it's versions and installation methods. For example using rpm or apt-get instead of yum or PostgreSQL instead of MySQL.

Versions mentioned here are current as of 18.06.2019 - they might of course change in the future.

More detailed installation instructions for other database engines and more sophisticated setups you can find at https://eazybi.com/help/private-eazybi-installation

Gather the software packages

flex.bi - you can get it from our support
Java SE - you can use the openjdk
MySQL connector - you have to get mysql java connector separately

You can either download (or at least try) these using some server side option like command wget or text browser lynx or just download these files to you machine and upload them via SFTP using a tool like Cyberduck

Depending on your server installation options it might be that you need also install packages like unzip, lynx, wget, vim or any other shell commands to perform these tasks, but this is outside the scope of this manual.

Install

Java

Run the following command to install Java:

yum install jre

Run the command java -version and make sure that the result matches the version you just installed.

MySQL/MariaDB

Run the following command to install MariaDB server:

sudo yum install mariadb-server

You can follow instructions available on MariaDB knowledge base.

Flex.bi

For security reasons we recommend creating dedicated flexbi user. Run the following command to achieve that:

sudo useradd flexbi

Move the flex.bi .zip archive file that you received from our support to /home/flexbi directory on your server.
Run the following command to unzip the .zip archive file (file name in the example can differ from the actual file depending on the software version):
unzip flexbi_private_ezbi-4.7.2_4.3.0_33cdc226e7d.zip

Now you should have /home/flexbi/flexbi_private directory containing the following folders:

app
bin
config
examples
lib
log
public
spec
tmp

MySQL connector

Move the downloaded MySQL connector file to /home/flexbi directory on your server and then run the following command to unzip the .zip archive file (file name in the example can differ from the actual file depending on the software version):
unzip mysql-connector-java-5.1.47.zip
Copy the jar file from the newly created folder to /home/flexbi/flexbi_private/lib directory (if it doesn't exist, create it). Run the following command to achieve that (java version in the example can differ from the actual version depending on the software version):
cp mysql-connector-java-5.1.47/mysql-connector-java-5.1.47-bin.jar flexbi_private/lib/

Setup and configuration

MariaDB

If you have large amount of records, we suggest to adjust the database engine performance by editing /etc/my.cnf file using appropriate values.

This is an example of a good performance configuration that you can insert under the [\mysqld]\ part of the configuration file:

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1024M
innodb_log_file_size = 256M
query_cache_size= 16M
query_cache_type = 1
max_connections = 200

If you change the log file size after starting the MariaDB, you have to delete ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 file from /var/lib/mysql/ directory.

Adjust the memory size to a level that you can actually afford on your server, taking into account Java and other application memory needs.

Run the following command to make sure MariaDB starts automatically on server startup:
systemctl enable mariadb
Run the following command to start MariaDB:
sudo systemctl start mariadb