Nathan Binford
egenus@hotmail.com

Contents:

Overview
Installation and Configuration of blog

The blog-utilities package consists of two programs which make it significantly easier to set up and configure blog for your purposes. First, there's KeyGen a DES private encryption key generator that will create a Java SecretKey and write it encoded to the file you specify. Second, there's initBlog which sets up your database structure (assuming you don't already have one created) and adds a root user to users list.

Before any setup tools can be run, there's a few things you must do first. You will need, of course, to download the blog-utilities package, and unpack it into the directory where you want blog (the location doesn't actually make a difference, but it makes more sense that way).

Next, go to your database engine and create a database:

CREATE DATABASE <blog_name>;

Now you must configure your blog preferences file to reflect what JDBC Driver and database connection string you are going to use. After you have done those tasks you can now run KeyGen and initBlog.

Run KeyGen first, because initBlog will need the private key to create the root user. Go to the directory where you put KeyGen and run it via the command line:

java -cp <path_to_where_you_put_blog>;<path_to_where_you_put_the_JCE> KeyGen <path_to_output_file>

Now you must add the output file path to the preferences file as the value of KeyFile (under the category KEY). Then you can run initBlog (also from the command line):

java -cp <path_to_where_you_put_blog>;<path_to_where_you_put_the_JCE> initBlog [-db if you want to want to create the database structure] <path_to_preferences_file>

If all goes well you are now configured to run blog (Wasn't that easy? Feel free to thank me.)