Manual Installation

Requirements

• Java 11 (Jdk up to 15 will work, 16+ might cause some reflection errors, we'll fix these once BlackLab migrates to jakarta)

• A java servlet container such as Apache Tomcat.

  • Tomcat 7 version 7.0.76 or newer
  • Tomcat 8 version 8.0.42 or newer.
  • Tomcat 9 any version should work, latest is recommended.
  • Tomcat 10 is not supported
    This because the Frontend has not yet migrated from javax->jakarta.
    We will likely perform this migration in version 4.1.

  Using older versions of Tomcat will cause some warnings from dependencies.

• An instance of BlackLab Server.
  While we do our best to make the frontend work with older versions of BlackLab, use a matching version of BlackLab (so blacklab-frontend v2.0 with blacklab-server v2.0).

Steps

1. Obtain a Release

   • Releases can be downloaded here.
   • Alternatively, build from source

2. Place the WAR file

   • Place the blacklab-frontend.war file in the webapps directory of your servlet container (e.g., Tomcat).

3. Configuration
   Configuration is described in more detail in the Configuration section. Basic steps are: create an environment variable BLACKLAB_CONFIG_DIR pointing to a directory containing a blacklab-frontend.properties file. Use this file to configure the frontend server component.

4. Access the Application

   • Navigate to http://localhost:8080/blacklab-frontend/ and you should be presented with a set of available corpora in BlackLab.

For further development and debugging help, see the Development section.