How to Install CTools on Windows

Last week I read a post from ‘Slawomir Chodnicki’ on “Creating Dashboards with CDE”. Thanks to him for a really useful post.

I wanted to install the CTools on my Pentaho environment. But the issue was that I was on Windows and the CTools installer is made for Unix/Linux environment.

Pedro Alves published a blog on How to install it on Unix and Yogaraj Khanal has used Cygwin to use it on Windows.

I am not a big fan of Cygwin plus due to IT restrictions it was a lengthy process to get CYGWIN installed on my machine,  I so I tried to install CDF/CDE/CDA without a script. It’s not That difficult actually. You just need to follow the steps mentioned in the Shell script “ctools-installer.sh”.

Steps:

1. Get the CDF/CDE/CDA files from location mentioned under ‘downloadCDF/CDA/CDE’ functions.

2. Put them under a temporary directory.

3. Remove any existing CDE/CDF/CDA files.

4. Unzip them as per details given under function ‘installCDF/CDE/CDA’.

5. Copy them to respective location.

Things to remember:

1. You’ve to first Unzip the dist.zip files. This will give you another set of Zip and Jar’s.

List of files:

cda-samples-TRUNK-20111013.zip
cda-TRUNK-20111013.zip                                                       CDA
cda-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar

pentaho-cdf-dd-solution-TRUNK-20111028.zip
pentaho-cdf-dd-TRUNK-20111028.zip                         CDF Dashboard
pentaho-cdf-dd-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar

pentaho-cdf-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.jar
pentaho-cdf-TRUNK-SNAPSHOT.zip                           CDE

2. Put the Jar’s into the location under Tomcat installation for Pentaho BI Server. In my case it was “tomcat\webapps\pentaho\WEB-INF\lib”.

3. Now the Zip files which You get from the Step 1, contain two sets of directory structures. One will be the configuration files for CDF/CDE/CDA and other will be Samples.

4. Samples need to be placed under ‘/biserver/pentaho-solutions’ and Configuration files under ‘/biserver/pentaho-solutions/system’

It took me 20 mins max to set this up. I started the BI server and lived “Happily ever After”

It’s no big deal but it might save you some time and un-necessary CYGWIN setup.