Installation

We've packaged a Corus distribution for most of the popular operating systems out there: Linux (main flavors thereof), Mac, Windows.

Supported Operating Systems

Technically speaking, Corus should run on any platform that supports Java. However, manually starting Java programs using custom scripts is kind of cumbersome. That's why we've packaged Corus so it can be started as a daemon (or service) at OS boot time.

The following subsections list the characteristics of the Corus installation, for each major OS.

Windows

Corus can be registered as a Windows service to run at startup and to manage execution lifecycle (stop, start, restart)
Various .bat files to manually execute the Corus server, the CLI, etc.
Only 32 bits version is available for native integration
Tested on Windows XP and Windows Vista. Windows 7 yet to come...

Understandably we're not going to overstretch ourselves trying to support this OS in an optimal fashion.

Mac OS

Integration with Mac launchd manager to run Corus as a LaunchDaemon or a LaunchAgent (based on your specific needs)
Various shell scripts to manually execute the Corus server and associated tools (CLI, Monitor, ...)
32 bits version available for OS X 10.5 (leopard) and above
64 bits version available for OS X 10.6 (snow leopard)
Tested on both Leopard (OS X 10.5) and Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)

Linux

init.d like script to integrate Corus to the Linux run levels (using special features like chkconfig when available)
Various shell scripts to manually execute the Corus server runtime and associated tools (CLI, Monitor, ...)
32 bits and 64 bits versions available
Tested on many flavours of Linux: CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE

Solaris

Integration with the Service Management Facility (SMF) to manage Corus as a system service within Solaris
Various shell scripts to manually execute the Corus server runtime and associated tools (CLI, monitor, ...)
Support for both Sparc (32 and 64 bits) and x86 architecture (32 bits only)
Tested with openSolaris 2009.06 on a x86 architecture

Download

The various Corus distributions can be found here. Make sure to select the appropriate version based on your operating system and your hardware architecture.

Setup

Because the configuration differs from one operating system to another, we will only provide an overview of the setup process. We have an installation section in our wiki, where step-by-step instructions are given on a per-OS basis.

The first three steps described below are common to installations on all operating systems. The last one is OS-specific.

1. Prepare the environment

Before actually installing a Corus distribution your need to think about the following things:

User - we strongly suggest to create a corus user that will be used to run the server. However on Windows you can decide to use a system user to run Corus as a service.
Directory - you can use any directory of your choice to install Corus (to the condition that the path to that directory has no space). To easily support evolution with newer version, we suggest to use a current symbolic link. For example if Corus is installed under the /opt/corus/corus-2.0 directory, creating the /opt/corus/current symbolic link that points to the corus-2.0 directory will facilitate the management of your environment variables. However this might not be appropriate for a Windows installation.

We emphasize: make sure that the path to your Corus installation contains no space.

2. Extract the corus distribution

Unzip or untar the Corus distribution file under you chosen installtion directory. If you choosed to create a specific user to run Corus, make sure that the files are owned by that user.

We strongly recommend that you create a symbolic (conveniently named "current") pointing to the directory where you extracted the Corus distribution files.

3. Define the required environment variables

To operate properly, Corus uses two environment variables:

JAVA_HOME - that points to the root of the JDK/JRE installation you want Corus to use
CORUS_HOME - that points to the directory (or symbolic link) of the Corus distribution (see the preceding steps for more info about the directory/symbolic link).

At this point, you have can start the corus server and try connecting to it with the CLI (command-line interface). To start Corus, open a new shell and type the following command in it: corus. This starts Corus on the default port (33000) and domain (which, incidentally, is named "default"). You will see the server's logging output in the terminal window (you can type CTRL-C at any time to stop the server).

To connect to Corus, type coruscli in another terminal (the CLI connects on localhost:33000 by default). You should see a welcome screen and then a prompt appearing. Type host in the CLI. You should get a reply from the server and see the corresponding output in the terminal.

Now that you're done testing, exit the CLI by typing exit or quit. In the server's terminal, type CTRL-C.

When working in development with Corus on your machine, starting it manually each time might be good enough. In such a case, the installation would be over.

But for production use, we suggest starting Corus as a native OS service, which we explain in the next section.

4. OS integration

This last step is OS-specific: it consists of configuring your OS to tell it how to run Corus as a native service. Go to our wiki to pick the part corresponding to your OS.

Moving Further

Once you have completed the installation, we suggest you go through our Learning section.