Installing Crowd on AWS

[Andrea C]

Hi,

I want to install Crowd in a AWS EC2 instance, what is the most stable operating system for running Crowd?

I installed it in the past using Amazon Linux but I had problems with java and Crowd wouldn't start unless it was running as root, and I definitely want to avoid that.

My choice would be Linux 18.04

Is there a step-by-step guide? Atlassian documentation is not very clear for me.

For example, which version of java should I install? How do I set up JAVA_HOME?

Do I launch Crowd using sudo?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Daniel Eads]

Hey there,

I'm assuming you've had a look at the Crowd install document and gotten stuck there. Unlike other Atlassian products, we don't provide a .bin installer for Crowd (on other products, this bundles a Java environment).

If you're selecting Ubuntu 18.04 as your operating system, you'll just need to make sure you have a suitable Java installed. For Crowd 3.5, you'll want a Java 8:

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk

There are various tutorials around the internet for adding the JAVA_HOME variable in Ubuntu, but if you've got a clean box and want to do it quick, you can just echo it into your profile and reload your bash:

echo export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/ >> ~/.bashrc && . ~/.bashrc

*Note that this adds the variable for the current user - if you're running Crowd as another user, you'll need to add the JAVA_HOME variable for that user as well.

I'd recommend using a dedicated service account for running Crowd. If you've got other Atlassian applications running on the same box, you could potentially use one of those accounts. Permissions are the gotcha for using different accounts. This varies a bit by setup so I don't want to be too prescriptive here. Let me know if you're still stuck on something in particular and we'll go from there!

Cheers,
Daniel