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Version: 4.53.0

Installation Guide

Welcome to Xill4!

This guide will help you to set up the Xill4 application as a background service.

Prerequisites​

As a prerequisite, you need to have a MongoDB instance (5.x or higher) running. If you don't have one, you can install it using the MongoDB installer from the MongoDB website.

By default, Xill4 will try to connect to mongodb://localhost:27017/xill4_system. If you want to change this, you can do so by setting the XILL4_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING system environment variable.

Installation​

  1. Verify or add the following environment variables:

    Required Variables​

    • XILL4_LICENSE_KEY

    • XILL4_ENVIRONMENT_SECRET. A string that is used to encrypt and decrypt secrets. This is used to store sensitive data. Try to come up with a unique string to be safe. Add the following environment variable XILL4_ENVIRONMENT_SECRET= to the .env file and add your secret after the = sign.

      note

      If openssl is installed, in terminal you can use the command openssl rand -hex 24 to generate a random string that you can use as a secret.

      In case you want to avoid adding XILL4_LICENSE_KEY and XILL4_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING as environment variables, you can simply edit the config.yml. The connectionString refers to the XILL4_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING variable explained in prerequisites.

      license:
          key: //REPLACE-ME-PLEASE;
      database:
          connectionString: //root:example@localhost:27017/xill4_system?authSource=admin
      mongodb:
          logger:
              levels:
                  - error
                  - info
                  - warn
                  - debug
                  # - trace
                  # - http

Optional Variables​

  • XILL4_WORKDIRS (optional, default: n/a). Set if file system access is required. For more information on how to set up file system access, see the documentation
  • XILL4_MONGO_CONNECTION. Example: mongodb://localhost:27017/ContentStore. The string to the MongoDB instance. This can be used in the component's configuration to establish a Mongo connection.

note

A comprehensive list of environment variables to customize Xill4 behavior is available in the official documentation. :::


How to start the application​

Although not required, we recommend setting the following environment variables XILL4_PROJECT_PATH to change the default locations of the project directory. This eases the upgrade process.

  1. Run the install.bat file to install Xill4 as a service from the command line with administrator privileges.
  2. You can run the executable file from the terminal by navigating to the folder where the .exe is located and type .\Xill4.exe.
note

Once the application has started, navigate to http://localhost:8000/.

Upgrade​

  1. Back up your project folder.
  2. Run the uninstall.bat file to uninstall Xill4 as a service from the command line with administrator privileges.
  3. Run the upgrade.exe tool to upgrade your existing projects.
  4. Run the install.bat file to install Xill4 as a service from the command line with administrator privileges.
note

There is currently a hard limit of 34 projects while upgrading. If you need to upgrade more projects, separate them in multiple folders.

Uninstalling​

  1. Run the uninstall.bat file to uninstall Xill4 as a service from the command line with administrator privileges.

Usage​

By default, the application will be accessible using the browser and is running using the Local System account. The account can be changed using the Windows Services Manager. Further configuration can be done using environment variables described in the built-in documentation, which is accessible from the front page of the application and on the Xillio website.