Preparing the PoolParty Installation & Upgrade

16/09/2025

Our new installer now embraces a modern, flexible approach using environment variables allowing you to manage all configuration settings in a single .env file - a change that brings two key benefits. It enables seamless integration with pipelines as well as automated deployments and simplifies the installation process by allowing all settings to be exported, prepared, and modified in advance.

This new approach uses the .env file containing all relevant environment variables.

Tip

We recommend collecting all mandatory details which you will need later during the installation. You will have to collect some important data on the target system as these details can be simply retrieved from the existing correctly configured setup.

Some basic mandatory target system details will be required during the installation procedure. Here is an example of mandatory parameters required for installation on a target system running a 64bit Linux distribution.

Our example uses example values - {url.base.scheme} for creating ontologies and custom schemes, for instance scheme.server.com; {url.base.vocabulary} for creating taxonomies, for instance vocabulary.server.com; {url.base.context} for named graphs, e.g. data.server.com; and {url.base.user} - the base URI for creating users, for instance resource.server.com/user

ENV_PATH_POOLPARTY_INSTALLATION="/opt/poolparty"
ENV_PATH_POOLPARTY_DATA="/opt/poolparty/data"
ENV_USER="poolparty"
ENV_GROUP="poolparty"
ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_SCHEME="https://scheme.server.com"
ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_VOCABULARY="https://vocabulary.server.com"
ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_CONTEXT="https://data.server.com"
ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_USER="https://resource.server.com/user"
ENV_PORT_POOLPARTY_TOMCAT="8081"
ENV_URL_KEYCLOAK="https://server.com:8181/auth"

The ENVs - or environment variables - help to automate the installation procedure. If you have a correct set of environment variables from your previous installation, you can export those and reuse them for any new installation. The table below lists all the ENV variables along with their default values.

Table 3. ENV variables used to automate the installation process

Mandatory to set	Example value	Remarks
`ENV_PATH_POOLPARTY_INSTALLATION`	`/opt/poolparty`	target directory should be empty on fresh installation
`ENV_PATH_POOLPARTY_DATA`	`/opt/poolparty/data`	target directory should be empty on fresh installation
`ENV_USER`	`poolparty`	has to exist in the system
`ENV_GROUP`	`poolparty`	has to exist in the system
`ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_SCHEME`	`http://localhost:8081`
`ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_VOCABULARY`	`http://localhost:8081`
`ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_CONTEXT`	`http://localhost:8081`
`ENV_URL_POOLPARTY_BASE_USER`	`http://localhost:8081/user`
`ENV_URL_KEYCLOAK`	`http://localhost:8081/auth`
`ENV_PORT_POOLPARTY_TOMCAT`	`8081`

There are few tasks you have to complete before you will be ready to install PoolParty.

You have to stop the PoolParty application. To do so switch to poolparty user and execute the stop command from the ENV_PATH_POOLPARTY_INSTALLATION/bin folder.
```
./poolparty stop
```
Make sure that no other PoolParty related process is currently running using the command below:
```
ps aux | grep java
```
The installation folder should be empty or not set up yet as the installer will create all required directories.

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