Crowd Home path as an Environment Variable on Windows 64-bit

[Jim Pickering]

Can anyone tell me how to set the Crowd Home path as an Enviornment Variable on Windows 64-bit? It is the actual var name that Crowd expects that is unknown. There doesn't seem to be docs to setup an Environment Variable for Windows, although a comment in the actual crowd-init.properties suggests it can be done as an alternative.

[Caspar Krieger · Accepted solution]

The variable name is the same as on *nix systems, and the same as the variable in the tmp file: crowd.home

On my linux system, I was able to set this variable in the tomcat's bin/setenv.sh and have Crowd recognise it.

If you're running Tomcat as a service on Windows, you might find this StackOverflow question and answer useful.

By the way, you can also specify the crowd.home property as a servlet context parameter.

Finally, if you add the line
log4j.logger.com.atlassian.config=DEBUG
to the end of crowd-webapp/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties then you'll get some debug information in the log as Crowd tries to read the property from each location.

[Jim Pickering]

Thanks Caspar. I apologize for the time it has taken for me to revisit and test this out. I did get this working, but not as I expected.

So for Fisheye, you simply add as a System Environment Variable FISHEYE_INST with a path, just like JAVA_HOME. The comment in crowd-init.properties says that Crowd Home can be run as a system environment variable. So people, like me, are trying to use Crowd.Home as a system environment variable, and it isn't working. I tried CROWD_HOME too; didn't work.

The link to the Stack Overflow article is what helped me. I edited the registry and modified the Options key at: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Apache Software Foundation\Procrun 2.0\Tomcat<X>\Parameters\Java (for 64-bit)

Dcrowd.home=C:\PROGRA~1\Atlassian\APPLIC~1\Crowd

My Crowd Home path is really C:\Program Files\Atlassian\Application Data\Crowd. The registry entry worked. Now when I upgrade Crowd by unzipping and replacing the files in the install folder, this is one less customization I will have to make.

Thanks.