Module CSC5002—ASR6: Middleware and software architecture for distributed applications

Local Software installations

For those who are going to use their personal computer, you are responsible of the installation of required software on your computer. The following instructions may be a help for the installation of software required for the teaching unit.

N.B.: The commands are given for a GNU Linux system and for distributions of the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, and many others).

Using the GitLabEnsee platform

We provide you with examples in a GitLabEnsee project, and we ask that you manage work under Git version control using this same platform.

We do not provide a step-by-step user guide for the GitLabEnsee platform here, and we assume that you are already familiar with version control using Git (see the prerequisites).

Connect to the the GitLabEnsee platform: https://gitlabensee.imtbs-tsp.eu", using your TSP account by using the button “IMTBS-TSP SSO”. SSO.

In order to pull from and push to the Git repositories, add your SSH key:

In the upper-right corner of the page, click the icon to access your account settings: Menu “Edit profile”.
In the menu on the left, select “Access” and then “SSH keys”.
To add a key, copy and paste the contents of the *.pub file.

Your are ready to clone projects, etc.

Installation of JAVA, Maven, and Eclipse

Installation of JAVA and Maven

Let us start by checking the Java installation. Version 21 is recommended. In TSP lab rooms B313 and 3a401, by default, your account is configured to use JAVA version 21.

$ java -version
openjdk version "21.0.12" 2026-07-21
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 21.0.12+8-1-24.04-Ubuntu)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 21.0.12+8-1-24.04-Ubuntu, mixed mode, sharing)
$ mvn --version
Apache Maven 3.9.7 (8b094c9513efc1b9ce2d952b3b9c8eaedaf8cbf0)
Maven home: /opt/maven
Java version: 21.0.12, vendor: Ubuntu, runtime: /usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk-amd64
Default locale: fr_FR, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "6.8.0-138-generic", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

Check the content of the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

echo $JAVA_HOME

If the variable does not exist, you should create it by adding the following two lines into your shell configuration file ~/.bashrc in order to point to the installed JAVA version:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk-amd64
PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:.:$JAVA_HOME/lib
export JAVA_HOME PATH CLASSPATH

If you do not have a JDK 21 version, you should first install it. Be careful! A JRE is not sufficient for compilation.

Instructions for installing OpenJdk: http://openjdk.java.net/install/. Link to JDK version 21.

Instructions for installing Maven: https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi.

Installation of Eclipse

If Eclipse is already installed, check your installation:

Menu Help, About Eclipse, whenever possible run the distribution "Eclipse Java IDE for Java Developers" version.
Menu Help, About Eclipse, Installation Details, Plug-ins, check that the following plug-ins are installed:
- Checkstyle Plug-in,
- SpotBugs Plug-in.

The URL for instructions for installing Eclipse is http://www.eclipse.org/. In the installer, choose "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers". Install the plug-ins with the Eclipse Marketplace (menu Help, Eclipse Marketplace...).

Installation of net tools

In order to verify which servers are running, we use two OS packages: net-tools and lsof. Verify that they are installed in your system. From the net-tools package, we will use the netstat command. These tools are installed with the following command (to be adapted to your system) :

sudo apt-get install lsof net-tools

Installation of Podman and Docker

In this course, we favour the use of Podman over Docker.

Installation of Podman

Follow the Podman Installation Instructions.

Podman is very similar to Docker. An advantage that Podman has compared to Docker is the lack of a central daemon and root privileges.

Installation of Docker

Follow the instructions on the docker installation page (e.g. on ubuntu).

To be able to run docker containers, you should be added to the docker group.

First, create the docker group if it does not yet exist (check groups with command groups):

sudo groupadd docker

Then, add your login to the list of the docker group members, and activate the changes to the group.

$ sudo gpasswd -a $USER docker
$ newgrp docker