Jul

Complete installation steps for ‘OpenFire’

Linux

openfire error, openfire installation, openfire JRE error, openfire linux

“Openfire is a real time collaboration (RTC) server licensed under the Open Source GPL. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.”

Installation of openfire is easy enough if you haven’t come across with any errors . When I was asked to install openfire for the first time, I tried it by using the tar ball, but failed! Then I successfully installed it using the RPM. But after installation, when you try to start openfire, you may get an error related to JRE(Java Runtime Enviornment). The fix for the JRE error is provided at the end of this post. Lets begin with the installation.

You need to have Java Runtime Enviornment on your Linux machine to install OpenFire. But this is not ’seriously’ mentioned on OpenFire official site documentaion .

First check whether you have JRE on your Linux box. Type the command java -version to know your current JRE version. Openfire needs JRE version 1.5.0 or higher. If you do not have the JRE or you are having a version below 1.5.0 you need to install the latest version before you start installing the Openfire. Install JRE using the following command.

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk.i386

Now lets begin OpenFire installation.

Installing OpenFire Using tar ball :-

Download the tarball on your Linux box

wget http://download.igniterealtime.org/openfire/openfire_3_6_4.tar.gz

Move the tarball to /opt and extract it there

tar -xzvf openfire_3_0_0.tar.gz

Execute openfire script

sh /opt/openfire/bin/openfire

Start openfire

/etc/init.d/openfire start

Installing OpenFire using RPM :-

Download the RPM

wget http://download.igniterealtime.org/openfire/openfire-3.6.4-1.i386.rpm

Move the RPM and install it on /opt/openfire

rpm -ivh openfire-3.6.4-1.i386.rpm

If installation is successfull, then great!

But most probably you may get the following error:

Error: JAVA_HOME is not defined correctly.
Can not sure execute /usr/local/jdk/bin/java.

This occurs when the home path for java is incorrectly specified on the openfire script. The fix for this error is :

rpm -ql java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-0.30.b09.el5

You may get the following result

/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre

change to java home path to /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre from /etc/sysconfig/openfire

vi /etc/sysconfig/openfire

Scroll to the bottom of the file and change the Java Home path as following

# If you wish to override the auto-detected JAVA_HOME variable, uncomment
# and change the following line.
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/jre

then start OpenFire