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 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.