Flowable Server

You should never run Flowable Work and Flowable Engage at the same time with the same database as they are mutually exclusive. Flowable Work is a subset of Flowable Engage. When running Flowable Engage you have access to everything in Flowable Work plus additional Engage features and capabilities.

  • Download Tomcat 8.5.x (latest version of the 8.5.x line) from: https://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi or Tomcat 9.x from https://tomcat.apache.org/download-90.cgi. Once you downloaded the package you should extract it. Do not run Tomcat yet, first follow the steps for installing the Flowable WARs.

  • Create (check Development Environment Setup) or download the executable Flowable Engage WAR file from the Flowable Maven Repository (appropriate access credentials are required): Flowable Engage

  • Rename the downloaded .war file to flowable-engage.war and copy it into the Tomcat’s webapps folder.

  • Flowable requires that you have a valid license for the Product. The license is either stored on the file system or in the database. If the license is provided as a file then it is typically located in the .flowable folder of your home directory. On Unix or macOS the file is ~/.flowable/flowable.license. The location of the license file can be changed in the application.properties file (see below).

      flowable.license.location=file:/myCustomLocation/flowable.license

    To store the license in the database then the following property must be set in the applications.properties file:

      flowable.license.db-store-enabled=true

    With the license database store mode enabled a license is uploaded using the Flowable Engage application.

  • Add a file named application.properties in the Tomcat’s lib folder. The file is used later for additional configuration.

  • You can now start the Tomcat by running bin/catalina.sh (bin\catalina.bat on Windows). Alternatively, you can run bin/catalina.sh run to have it in the foreground.

  • You should now be able to access the applications by going to: http://localhost:8080/flowable-engage.

  • You can login with the default administration user admin. The password is test.

An executable .WAR file is a special variant of a .WAR file that can be both copied to a servlet container or executed directly with Java. In the second case an embedded Tomcat server starts that hosts the Flowable Engage application. You can start the Flowable Server directly by executing java -jar flowable-engage.war

The application can then be accessed at http://localhost:8090/flowable-engage.