eXo Platform is an open source, standard-based, Enterprise Social Platform written in Java and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It is full featured, based on standards, extensible and has an amazing design.

In this guide, I’ll show how to install eXo Platform on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS. Although this guide was written during installation on Ubuntu 14.04 (Thrusty), it should work for other Debian based distributions.

Update OS
This might be necessary or not depending on your environment, but I always recommend running up-to-date software for stability and security. On Ubuntu, we can easily do this with:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Create directory and download eXo platform
The following will create a directory at “/var/eXo”, download eXo into it and unzip it:

mkdir -p /var/exo && cd /var/exo

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/exo/files/Platform4.1/eXo-Platform-community-4.1.0-RC1.zip && unzip *

At this point, you should have a slightly disorganized directory containing the downloaded zip and the extracted content. We clean this up with the following:

rm *.zip && cd * && mv * ../ && cd ../

Let’s go over exactly what is happening here. ‘rm *.zip’ removes anything in the directory that ends with .zip, * is a wildcard for anything including directories but we have specifically instructed shell to remove .zip files, this will be our downloaded zip which is now redundant since we extracted it above. ‘cd *’ instructs shell to change directory into anything (*) which will be our eXo-Platform directory. ‘mv * ../’ moves the content of the directory we’ve just entered into the previous directory (../), this situates eXo’s files at ‘/var/exo’ which is what we’re trying to achieve and the last command ‘cd ../’ takes us back to /var/exo.

Set permissions and Start eXo Platform

chmod +x start_eXo.sh && ./start_eXo.sh

The last line grants the start_eXo shell script executable permission and starts the application.

You should see a lot of text scroll through your screen (this might take a while). The application is started when you see “Server startup in 198435 ms” and would be accessible at http://0.0.0.0:8080 (replace 0.0.0.0) with your server IP address.