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What user account owns the VIVO directories?

In many operating systems, the issue of file permissions is important. Who owns the files? Who is authorized to read them, or to write new files?

When running the VIVO build script, it must have permission to read and write to:

• the VIVO distribution directory
• the Tomcat webapps directory
• the VIVO home directory

When VIVO is started under Tomcat, Tomcat must have permission to read and write to:

• the Tomcat webapps directory
• the VIVO home directory

There are several ways to make this work. People who are experimenting with VIVO often use their own account to create the VIVO distribution directory, to run the build script, and to run Tomcat.

In more formal environments, it may be necessary to run Tomcat as a service, under its own account. In that case, some people choose to run the build script with root privilege, and then assign the resulting files to Tomcat:

sudo ant all
sudo chown -R tomcat /usr/local/vivo/home
sudo chown -R tomcat /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/vivo*

When installing on Microsoft Windows, this is not usually a problem.