KBEC-00181 - Creating a mirror or custom plugin catalog

Description

Adding and maintaining plugins is easy if you have internet access. The Plugin Manager provides point-and-click plugin usage.

What if:

1. Your Flow Server does not have internet access.
2. You want to have a restrictive or expanded catalog for your Flow Server site.

Solution

Use the Flow Web Server to host the plugin catalog.

On the existing Flow Web Server do the following:

1. Create a directory "catalog" accessible by the Flow Web Server.
2. From a machine that has internet access, use a web browser to go to http://plugins.electric-cloud.com/catalog/browse.php:
   1. Download each plugin
   2. Save the plugin package to the Web Server catalog
3. Have the plugin manager point to a local plugin catalog:
   1. Go to Administration > Plugins.
   2. Select the "EC Plugin Manager" link.
   3. Go to the Properties tab.
   4. Modify the 'catalogUrl' property, specifying a URL to a directory accessible on the internal network.

Example

Web Server setup

To use the existing Apache server that ships with ElectricFlow to store the local plugin catalog:

1. Create the directory "<commanderInstallerDir>/apache/htdocs/catalog"
2. Using a web browser, save the online catalog file http://plugins.electric-cloud.com/catalog/catalog.xml to <commanderInstallerDir>/apache/htdocs/catalog
3. Edit the local version of catalog.xml, replacing all instances of 'plugins.electric-cloud.com' with the hostname of the Flow server.
4. Change 'catalog'Url' to http:///catalog/catalog.xml, where 'WebServerHost' is the name of your Flow server host.

Single Plugin update

To host the specialty plugin EC-CSH locally on the existing Web Server:

1. From a machine that has internet access, go to http://plugins.electric-cloud.com/catalog/browse.php
2. Save the EC-CSH package (a jar file) to <commanderInstallerDir>/apache/htdocs/catalog