Flowable Design

This chapter describes how Flowable Design can be installed and configured to be able to create models and deploy them as Apps to Flowable Engage.

  1. 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 unpack it. Do no run the Tomcat yet, first follow the steps for the installing the Flowable Design WAR.

  2. Download the Flowable Design WAR file from the Flowable Maven Repository (appropriate access credentials are needed): Flowable Design.

  3. Rename the .war file to flowable-design.war and copy it into the Tomcat’s webapps folder.

  4. 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.modeler.app.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.modeler.app.db-store-enabled=true

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

  5. Add a file named application.properties in the Tomcat’s lib folder. The file is used later to configure Flowable Design.

  6. To be able to deploy/undeploy Apps directly into an instance of Flowable Engage add the following properties to the application.properties file you just created. Remember to adapt the values (e.g., server, port, context, etc.) to your specific installation values:

    flowable.modeler.app.deployment-api-url=http://localhost:8080/flowable-engage/app-api
flowable.modeler.app.undeployment-api-url=http://localhost:8080/flowable-engage/platform-api/app-deployments

  7. 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 run in the foreground.

  8. You can now access Flowable Design by going to: http://localhost:8080/flowable-design.

  9. You can login with the user admin and password test.