Prerequisites for building and running apps with the Alfresco Application Development Framework

The Angular 2 based application development framework requires the following:

An Alfresco Platform Repository to talk to, which has CORS enabled.
Node.js JavaScript runtime.
npm package manager for JavaScript.
Access to the Alfresco private npm repository that contains the web components (note, you need VPN access to view)

Installing Alfresco

Alfresco comes with installers that will install all the servers, webapps, and tools needed to run Alfresco.

Download Alfresco Community from this page.
Install Alfresco following these instructions.

This will install the following Alfresco web applications:

Alfresco Platform with the Content Repository, which we need so we can access content from our custom web client
Alfresco Solr, which we need so we can search for content from our custom web client
Alfresco Share, not technically needed, but can be useful for creating users and groups, and to access and upload content to the repository while we are developing the custom web client

Enable CORS in Alfresco

The web client that we are building with the application development framework will be loaded from a different web server than the Alfresco Platform is running on. So we need to tell the Alfresco server that any request that comes in from this custom web client should be allowed access to the Content Repository. This is done by enabling CORS.

To enable CORS in the Alfresco Platform do the following:

Modify tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/web.xml and uncomment the following section and update cors.allowOrigin to http://localhost:3000:

      <filter-name>CORS</filter-name>
      <filter-class>com.thetransactioncompany.cors.CORSFilter</filter-class>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.allowGenericHttpRequests</param-name>
         <param-value>true</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.allowOrigin</param-name>
         <param-value>http://localhost:3000</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.allowSubdomains</param-name>
         <param-value>true</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.supportedMethods</param-name>
         <param-value>GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.supportedHeaders</param-name>
         <param-value>origin, authorization, x-file-size, x-file-name, content-type, accept, x-file-type</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.supportsCredentials</param-name>
         <param-value>true</param-value>
      </init-param>
      <init-param>
         <param-name>cors.maxAge</param-name>
         <param-value>3600</param-value>
      </init-param>
   </filter>

When specifying the cors.allowOrigin URL make sure to use the URL that will be used by the web client.

Then uncomment filter mappings:

      <filter-name>CORS</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>/api/*</url-pattern>
      <url-pattern>/service/*</url-pattern>
      <url-pattern>/s/*</url-pattern>
      <url-pattern>/cmisbrowser/*</url-pattern>
   </filter-mapping>

Installing Node.js

If you don't have Node.js installed then access this page and use the appropriate installer for your OS.

Make sure the Node.js version is > 5:

$ node -v
v5.12.0

Installing npm

The npm package manager is included with Node.js, however it is not usually the latest version as npm is updated more frequently than node.js.

Update npm as follows:

$ npm install npm -g

Configure Alfresco Private npm repository

All the distribution packages for the application development framework components are stored in Alfresco's private npm repository, which is visible only from the internal Alfresco LAN (or through VPN). We need to tell npm about this repository.

Set up Alfresco's private npm repository as follows:

$ npm set registry http://devproducts.alfresco.me:4873

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