Jasper Report Server Deployment Distilled

1. Installer or WAR?

The community project installation guide says: 'For production environments, use the WAR file distribution.'

2. Deploy WAR

Read the official installation guide, chapter 'Installing the WAR file distribution', 

STEP 1: Set up Tomcat, MySQL, JAVA_HOME environment variable, etc, easy!

STEP 2: execute the script, js-install-ce.bat (for Windows)

Note that 

(1) you don't have to have Windows' administrator privilege, however, you do need MySQL's enough privilege to create databases and tables.

(2) some ant tasks might fail, don't worry, they might be optional, like sample database creation. Once the task failed, you still can do manual WAR installation, just execute some jasper scripts, very easy, look up the documentation.

3. Troubleshooting

During our first deployment, we came across 3 errors.

3.1 Tomcat OutOfMerroryError

Check out the installation guide's section 'Tomcat and JBoss JVM Options', revise the file %TOMCAT_HOME%/bin/catalina.bat,

set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Xms1024m -Xmx2048m -XX:PermSize=32m
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Xss2m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled
echo Using CATALINA_BASE:   "%CATALINA_BASE%"
echo Using CATALINA_HOME:   "%CATALINA_HOME%"
echo Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: "%CATALINA_TMPDIR%"

Note that the first 3 lines were added by us.

3.2 operationnotsupportedexception context is read only

See my other article:http://blog.csdn.net/derek_zhang_/article/details/37657395

3.3 sessionFactory Null Error

Just make sure DO NOT configure JNDI resource 'jdbc/jasperserver' in Tomcat, since we don't use JNDI due to the issue described in 3.2
4. Install MySQL driver and Create Data Source on Jasper Server

You can do it on the localhost jasper server webpage, trivial.

5. Deploy Reports

Though we can't upload reports online with community edition, it's feasible to do it with Jasper Studio, please refer to this great material: http://community.jaspersoft.com/wiki/connect-jaspersoft-studio-jasperreports-server