Update 2022-10-03 This article was originally posted on Wordpress. It has been moved here so that I can clean up the Wordpress account!

YAWLbox, a self contained YAWL engine

Following my initial play with YAWL on a Debian box, I have now created a Vagrant base box that can be downloaded and deployed from Dropbox.

This can be used as the base platform for experimenting with YAWL4Enterprise.

Getting Started

To get up and running, and provided that you have Vagrant and VirtualBox already installed on your server, then the following is all you need:

    mkdir yawlbox
    cd yawlbox
    vagrant init yawlbox https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5zembswmxjg94gi/tivEVgfYpz/vagrant-yawlbox-235-20130911.box
    vagrant up

You should be able to watch the boot process by connecting to the console with any RDP client, such as tsclient or xfreerdp, the VRDE port is the default 3389.

Once, the box is up, you can login with vagrant ssh. You should also be able to connect to YAWL with http://localhost:8888/resourceService.

For connecting from the YAWL Editor to the engine you would need to adjust the hostname and port as above. The change can be done in the Settings drop down menu of the Editor with the “Engine Connection” and “Resource Service Connection” menu items.

The Software Stack

The box consists of the following major components:

  1. Debian 7.1.0 (Wheezy)
  2. PostgreSQL 9.2
  3. Tomcat 7
  4. YAWL Engine 2.3.5

Box Configuration

Debian

The set of packages installed at the base OS layer is minimal, there are no Desktop, X11 or other software included. The base OS only contains what is needed for PostgreSQL, Tomcat and YAWL.

PostgreSQL

This was installed using the apt repository at postgresql.org. A new database was created for yawl with owner postgres and the password expected by YAWL.

The box uses single NAT interface to connect to the outside world. There are two port forwarding rules that allow the outside world to connect to the vbox. These are shown below, and defined in the VagrantFile that was created during the vagrant init phase:

Host Guest Guest Service
2222 22 SSH server
8888 8080 Tomcat service

Important Notes

The vagrant box is intended as a conventient way for anyone interested in experimenting or building prototypes with the YAWL4Enterprise engine. As it stands the box needs additional changes, such as the default passwords for Vagrant, YAWL and Tomcat (see the respective manuals for the details) before the system is ready for production use.

The box comes with no warranties whatsoever, Do drop me a line if you find this useful, or experienced problems with the configuration.