Quickstart

This chapter describes how to quickly get started with a developer installation. As a starting point there is an example project, ACE Starter Kit, available on GitHub. The starter kit includes a Docker Compose file that can run ACE Core, ACE Content Developer and the third party dependencies required for ACE to run, and some example content to demonstrate how to work with content in a project.

Note that the Docker images for the third party dependencies used in the starter kit are not intended for use in production and are offered with no support from Atex.

For a production installation, see Installing Ace.

GitHub access

Open a support issue, or send an email to spolopoly@atex.com to get access.

References

• https://github.com/atex-polopoly/ace-starterkit
• http://support.atex.com/jira
• http://ace.atex.com

Prerequisites

To successfully run ACE and the Starter Kit project, you should use the following minumum software versions:

• Maven: 3.6.3 or higher
• Java: JDK 21
• Docker and Docker Compose: See versions in Installing ACE

Configuring a development environment

There are a few import configurations you may want to make when setting up a development environment with ACE.

Memory usage

Most of the ACE components and dependencies are written in Java, and by default they are configured to use rather a lot of memory. On a developer workstation you may want to reduce the memory allocation. This is done using environment variables - ACE_JAVA_OPTS for ACE components, SOLR_HEAP for Solr, and KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS for Kafka. The following table shows how to set the limit to 256 megabytes using the three different variables.

Image	Variable
Solr	SOLR_HEAP=256m
Kafka, kafka-connect	KAFKA_HEAP_OPTS=-Xmx256m
ACE services	ACE_JAVA_OPTS=-Xmx128m

With the exception of the content service which needs about 2048m, ACE services can usually manage with 128m for development, while Solr and Kafka need at least 256m. Exactly how much you will need depends on what you're doing - the more content and code you have, the more memory will be used. If you run into memory issues, slightly increase the service memory allocations. Another option for the Content Service is to reduce the in-memory content cache sizes. Please see the Content Service Configuration for more information.

Users

There are two possible sources of user credentials for an ACE installation: LDAP and a *NIX-like password file.

The ACE Starter Kit comes with the password file option as default.

Please see the Authentication documentation for more information.