a quick setup for OpenClinica 3.1 Beta

January 2011 started with the announcement by Akaza that OC 3.1 Beta is ready to download. I'm sure many of you, like myself, have already been looking at the Alpha version or have been peeking at the trunk. And you downloaded the zip or tar and now you want to have a good look around, before you decide to move to this new release or not. But you don't want to loose your precious test environment with OC 3.0.4.2 or what have you. Well, here's an easy way to setup OC 3.1, next to your existing environment.

six easy steps

1. Start with stopping both Tomcat and Postgres. Put the OpenClinica-web.war in the webapps directory, or upload it to your test-server.
2. Now start Tomcat, but not Postgres. The reason is that Tomcat will unpack the war, but OC can do nothing with the database not available. Wait until the famous webapps\OpenClinica-web\WEB-INF\classes\datainfo.properties is in place.
3. Stop Tomcat again and open datainfo.properties for editing.
4. Change the line db=openclinica into db=openclinica31.
If you're running Windows, also change:
- filePath=$catalina.home/.data/ into filePath=c:\\Tomcat\\openclinica-web.data and create this directory
- change log.dir=/usr/local/tomcat/logs/openclinica into log.dir=c:\\Tomcat\\logs\\openclinica-web
- uncomment supportURL=http://www.openclinica.org/OpenClinica/3.0/support/
5. Start Postgres, but not Tomcat and create a database called openclinica31, (UTF-8) with owner clinica.
6. Now start Tomcat and you're in bussiness!

You'll probably want to Stop the other OpenClinica. Or you'll go online to order some more memory, because this Beta needs a lot!