Table of Contents

Activiti for Business Process Management

This tutorial show you few steps to install Activiti on your machine.

Getting started

  1. Download and extract [https://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.12/bin/apache-tomcat-7.0.12.zip|Tomcat]] (suppose version 7.0.12) on your working directory.
  2. Download and extract the activiti-5.22.0.zip from http://activiti.org/download.html on your working directory.
  3. Copy activiti-5.22.0\wars\activiti-explorer.war to apache-tomcat-7.0.12\webapps.
  4. Start your tomcat by executing apache-tomcat-7.0.12\bin\startup.bat (Windows) or apache-tomcat-7.0.12\bin\startup.bat (Linux).
  5. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:8080/activiti-explorer/. Thereafter, you will enter the Activiti Explorer web application:


  6. Login as admin with kermit/kermit, then you will be able to use the Activiti Explorer web application:


  7. Currently, the Activiti uses an in-memory H2 database by default. So, your data will be lost once your tomcat is restarted. To prevent this, you can configure the Activiti to store data in a database, MySQL in this place. To do so, please follow the steps in next section.

Configure MySQL database

  1. Make sure to stop your tomcat by executing apache-tomcat-7.0.12\bin\shutdown.bat (Windows) or apache-tomcat-7.0.12\bin\shutdown.bat (Linux).
  2. Download and install MySQL Community Edition (GPL) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ on your machine.
  3. Once you install the MySQL on your machine, create a new database called Activiti. You can simply do it by starting the MYSQL Command Line Client, then enter a command: 

    CREATE DATABASE Activiti;

    or you can use your favorite tool to do it. Mine is HeidiSQL.

  4. Edit the file apache-tomcat-7.0.12\webapps\activiti-explorer\WEB-INF\classes\db.properties as follow: 

    db=mysql
jdbc.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/activiti
jdbc.username=YOUR_MYSQL_USERNAME
jdbc.password=YOUR_MYSQL_PASSWORD
  5. Edit the file apache-tomcat-7.0.12\webapps\activiti-explorer\WEB-INF\classes\engine.properties as follow: 

    # demo data properties
create.demo.users=true
create.demo.definitions=false
create.demo.models=false
create.demo.reports=false

    Note that you may change create.demo.definitions=true to have some samples of process model.

  6. Download mysql-connector-java-5.1.27.jar from http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/mysql/mysql-connector-java.
  7. Copy the downloaded mysql-connector-java-5.1.27.jar file to apache-tomcat-7.0.12\webapps\activiti-explorer\WEB-INF\lib
  8. Start your tomcat.
  9. Open your browser and go to http://localhost:8080/activiti-explorer/. Login as admin with kermit/kermit to make sure that your Activiti works fine.