Easy Openbravo steps (Duplicating an instance)

Hello world,

You have a remote server with an Openbravo Instance, you need a local clone to start your development, what do you need to do?

Assumptions: process are similar, in this particular case we are using a local pc with Windows/PostgreSQL and the remote server is using a Linux core/PostgreSQL

Steps
0. Connect to the remote server
1. Backup a PostgreSQL database
2. Backup the OB folder
3. Restoring DB
4. Restoring OB 
5. Configuring Openbravo.properties
6. Compiling

0. Connect to the a remote server 

 You need to establish an SSH connection with the remote server, I will be using BitVise for Windows (it provides SSH, an SFTP GUI and Port Forwarding) 

 Add your credentials and remember that some servers need public keys that you need to add. Once logged in, a new terminal will prompt;
 

1. Backup a PostgreSQL database

In our new remote terminal we can execute pg_dump to backup our PostgreSQL database, with default values e.g.
pg_dump -U tad -p 5432 -h localhost -v -f OpenbravoDB_$(date '+%d%m20%y').dmp openbravo

2. Backup the OB folder

You need to find where is the openbravo-erp folder (e.g. find / -name openbravo-erp) and then you can compress the folder, like this:

 tar -hzcf openbravo_$(date '+%d%m20%y').tar.gz openbravo-erp/

It is common to have symbolic links in your modules folder, due to DVCS (e.g. git, mercurial), that's why you should add -h parameter when you are compressing the folder, to include the files of symbolic links.

3. Restoring DB

Open PgAdmin, right click on the Database and select restore:

 

Then select the dmp file that you create and proceed with the restore.

4. Restoring OB 

You need WinRar or 7Zip to extract the folder, considering Windows has restrinction on the length (path length) try to decompress OB near the drive level, e.g. :

C:\OB\MyInstance1\openbravo-erp


5. Configuring Openbravo.properties

Open the file:
C:\OB\MyInstance1\openbravo-erp\config\Openbravo.properties


 There are parameters that usually you don't need to change, here I mention the ones that you will often change (credentials and locations):

# Absolute path to the attachments directory
attach.path=C:/OB/MyInstance1/openbravo-erp/attachments
 #Careful, maybe you need to manually create this folder
 #Note that you need / even for Windows systems

# Root sources directory, used by modularity
source.path=C:/OB/MyInstance1/openbravo-erp/

#Default values
bbdd.rdbms=POSTGRE
bbdd.driver=org.postgresql.Driver
bbdd.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432
bbdd.sid=aTutorial
bbdd.systemUser=postgres
bbdd.systemPassword=postgres
bbdd.user=tad
bbdd.password=tad
bbdd.sessionConfig=select update_dateFormat('DD-MM-YYYY') 


6. Compiling

Finally, the last step will be to run these ant tasks individually and check the result:
ant update.database -Dforce=yes 
ant compile.complete.deploy
 
This is to make sure that the database records match the modules and lastly to make sure your Java code is working.

Done, now run tomcat and start playing!