Between Christmas and New Year I've had some time at home to play around with NetWeaver Cloud. This time I was wondering how to make it easier to run SAP NetWeaver Cloud on your machine with very little efforts to setup the infrastructure.
The persona for this script
The person that I wrote this script for is somebody
- who likes to understand what you can do with NetWeaver Cloud
- doesn't want to spend too much time and create a big data footprint on the hard drive
- or simply wants to try out something new (just like me) :-)
The list of assets
After thinking through this is my list of assets I wanted to use
- a Virtualized Ubuntu machine
- SAP NetWeaver Cloud
- the related SDK and the Eclipse Tools
- a bash script to install everything properly with close-to-zero effort
Step 1: Setup a virtualized Ubuntu
After trying out the latest version Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 I found out that the more stable release is 12.04. With 12.10 I faced several issues with bad performance and after crawling the internet that seems to be a known issue that hasn't been fixed, yet.
So I took Ubuntu 12.04 desktop and installed it on VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. This went pretty quickly and took me around 5 minutes.
Remember the password you've given the system :-)
Step 2: Download SAP NetWeaver Cloud SDK
Start Ubuntu and the Firefox browser, go to the SAP NetWeaver Cloud Update Site and download the SAP NetWeaver Cloud SDK.
Store it in the Downloads folder of your user.
Step 3: Store and run the bash-script
Now we get to the fun part of all of this.
Start the terminal in Ubuntu. For that you click on the Dash Home button at the top left and type-in Terminal into the search box. Click on the Terminal button showing up below the search field.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Now you change to the Downloads folder and create a bash file called install.sh. For that you need to be logged-on as a root user.
sudo -s
cd Downloads
sudo gedit install.sh
Take the text below and copy and paste it to the editor in your Ubuntu system.
#!/bin/bash
echo "###########################################################"
echo "## Define variables for pre-downloaded software and URLs"
echo "###########################################################"
echo "# Neo SDK (get the file at https://tools.netweaver.ondemand.com/)"
echo "# The file needs to be stored in the Downloads folder"
filenameNeoSdk=neo-sdk-1.17.0.zip
urlCloudTools=https://tools.netweaver.ondemand.com/juno
echo "# Ensure that the script changes into the Downloads folder"
cd $HOME/Downloads
echo "###########################################################"
echo "## Update your ubuntu system"
echo "###########################################################"
apt-get update
echo "# Now upgrade assuming that all questions from the"
echo "# upgrade will be answered with yes"
apt-get upgrade --assume-yes
apt-get autoclean
apt-get autoremove
echo "###########################################################"
echo "## Install some additional packages"
echo "###########################################################"
echo "# Install JDK"
apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless --assume-yes
echo "###########################################################"
echo "## Install Eclipse"
echo "###########################################################"
echo "# Get Eclipse Juno for Linux (32 bit)"
echo "# Unzip the Eclipse tar file into the current folder"
tar xzf eclipse-jee-juno-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz
echo "# Move it to the opt directory"
mv eclipse /opt/
echo "###########################################################"
echo "## Start Eclipse"
echo "###########################################################"
/opt/eclipse/eclipse -clean
You need to ensure that the text #!/bin/bash is really on the first line. Additionally you'll also have to adapt the filename for the SDK you've downloaded to the name in the script in line 7
filenameNeoSdk=neo-sdk-1.17.0.zip
Save the file and exit the editor by closing it.
Before you can run it you need to make the bash file executable. You do that with the following command:
chmod +x install.sh
The only thing left to do now is to run the script and wait until Eclipse starts.
./install.sh
What will the script do? It'll
- first update the Ubuntu OS itself (till line 21)
- install Java on Ubuntu (line 23 - 27)
- install Eclipse Juno (line 29 - 38)
- start Eclipse (line 43)
Step 4: Setting up Eclipse
This is the part I'm still not happy with. Ideally one could install the SAP NetWeaver tools via the command line, too. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make that work. In theory this should work with the p2 director application, but I wasn't able to provide the SCN credentials to the script.
So just follow the instructions on the SAP NetWeaver Cloud Update Site on step number 3 and you're done :-)
Step 5: Taking advantage of the VM
Once you were able to setup everything properly you should create a snapshot of your VM and secure it. From this point on you can restore the VM whenever you want and have a fully functional development environment for SAP NetWeaver Cloud.
Not 100% there, yet
If I compare what I've tried to achieve and what I was able to do I wasn't successful in automating everything. There are a few things left:
- In case you have an idea how to automate the installation of the SAP NetWeaver tools via the command line, please let me know and I'll update this blog accordingly.
- Adding the NetWeaver server automatically would be another thing I'd like to see being automated. Again maybe some of you have an idea on how to best do it via the command line. Please let me know.
- Any other idea how to improve the script? Please add a comment to this blog and I'll try to incorporate it.
It was a nice exercise to setup the script and install the development environment for SAP NetWeaver Cloud.
I hope you find this useful, too.
Best,
Rui