How to Deploy Bold Reports in Linux [Webinar Show Notes]

This blog provides show notes for our December 02, 2021, webinar, “How to Deploy Bold Reports in Linux”. The webinar was presented by Syncfusion Testing Engineer Mohanbabu Ravichandran. A recording of the webinar is embedded below.

Introduction to Enterprise Reporting

Bold Reports Enterprise Reporting is a business intelligence report management tool, built by Syncfusion for creating, managing, and distributing pixel-perfect paginated RDL reports behind your organization’s firewall.
Business users need a reporting tool to track and improve their business.
It helps us to analyse, explain, and report business information in our day-to-day life.

Multiple ways of Deployment

Bold Reports can be deployed anywhere.
You can host within your organization’s firewall with any of the following deployment modes.

• Windows Installer – Install in any windows machine
• Linux package – Install in any Linux machine
• Azure package – Install in your own Azure cloud provider
• Kubernetes – Install in your own Kubernetes environment

Since the application is installed within our firewall, we have complete control over it and no need to worry about external security violations.
Here, we are going to install the Enterprise Reporting using Linux Machine.

Prerequisites

Before deploying the application on a Linux machine, let us see the prerequisites of the machine.
The following hardware configurations are necessary to run the Bold Reports server:

• Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• CPU: 4-core.
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Disk space: 5 GB or more.

The following software are necessary to run the Bold Reports Enterprise edition:

• Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2012+, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
• Web Server: Nginx.
• Web Browser: Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Chrome.

Some useful commands for installation

Before installing the Linux package, let’s go through some of the useful commands that will be helpful in the installation process.

• sudo apt-get update – Downloads the package lists from the repositories and “updates” them to get information on the newest versions of packages and their dependencies.
• sudo apt-get install nginx – This command is used to install Nginx. NGINX is open-source software for web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more.
• sudo apt-get install zip – This command is used to zip or unzip the file.
• sudo apt-get install libgdiplus – This command is used to install the GDIPlus package to render the text and images.
• sudo wget {Bold Reports Linux package link} – This command is used to download the Linux package.
• sudo unzip {Bold Reports Linux package zip file} – This command is used to unzip the downloaded file.
• cd BoldReportsEnterpriseEdition-Linux – This command is used to change the directory.
• sudo bash install-boldreports.sh -i {new} -u {user} -h {host URL} -n {true or false} – This command is an installation command. Here: install-boldreports.sh is the file name in which we configured the installation.

1. i refers to Installation type – It specifies whether it is a new or upgrade installation.
2. u stands for user – It specifies the user or group that manages the service.
3. h denotes host – The domain or IP address of the machine with http protocol.
4. n express ngnix configuration – Setting this to “true” will automatically configure the Bold Reports with Nginx front-end server.

• sudo bash install-optional.libs.sh install-optional-libs {user} {data source} – This command is used to install the client libraries on our server.
• sudo nginx –t – This command is used to verify the syntax of the configuration file.
• sudo nginx -s reload – This command is used to reload the ngnix file.

Installation on Linux machine

Now we have prepared the Linux machine, with all the prerequisites necessary for installing. To get started with the installation, we have to download the latest Bold Reports Enterprise reporting Linux package from here.
Let’s start to deploy enterprise reporting on Linux.

Install the Prerequisites package using the below commands

• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install nginx
• sudo apt-get install zip
• sudo apt-get install libgdiplus

Download the Linux package using the below command: sudo wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/files2.syncfusion.com/Installs/Bold/BoldReports/v3.3.23/BoldReports_EnterpriseReporting_Linux.zip. It will be downloaded as a zip file.

After downloading the Linux package, unzip the downloaded file by using the below command: sudo unzip BoldReports_EnterpriseReporting_Linux.zip

Now, you can install Enterprise Reporting using the below command: sudo bash install-boldreports.sh -i new -u root -h http://159.65.153.192 -n true

Installation of client libraries

To include third party data sources, we have provided an option to choose the necessary client libraries from the following list:

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PhantomJS

Client libraries

Note: Bold Reports Enterprise Edition uses client libraries such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL to connect with their respective SQL database variants. You need to read and accept client library license to install client libraries.

1. Go to client library location. /var/www/bold-services/clientlibrary/ 
2. After installation, you first need to change the directory, using the following cd command: cd /var/www/bold-services/clientlibrary/
3. Here, you can see the client library consent document consent-to-deploy-client-libraries.txt. Read client libraries LICENSE details and execute the following command to install client libraries: sudo bash install-optional.libs.sh install-optional-libs root postgresql,mysql,oracle

PhantomJS

• Before installing PhantomJS, you will need to install some required packages on your linux system. You can install all of them with the following command: sudo apt-get install build-essential chrpath libssl-dev libxft-dev libfreetype6-dev libfreetype6 libfontconfig1-dev libfontconfig1 -y
• You will need to download the PhantomJS. You can download the latest stable version of the PhantomJS from their official website. Run the following command to download PhantomJS: sudo wget https://bitbucket.org/ariya/phantomjs/downloads/phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
• Once the download is complete, extract the downloaded archive file to desired system location: sudo tar xvjf phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/share/
• Next, create a symlink of PhantomJS binary file to systems bin directory: sudo ln -s /usr/local/share/phantomjs-2.1.1-linux-x86_64/bin/phantomjs /usr/local/bin/
• Verify PhantomJS installed on your system with the following command: phantomjs –version
• You can see the following PhantomJS version: 2.1.1

Note: PhantomJS needs some dependencies. If your distribution does not contain the dependencies, please install it. https://phantomjs.org/download.html.

Configuration of SSL

• SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It’s the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems.
• SSL Certificate, SSL Key, and Domain Name are required for SSL configuration.
• SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates a website’s identity and enables an encrypted connection.
• SSL Key gives you the power to authenticate our website to internet users and helps to enable encryption.
• Domain name is a string of text that maps to a numeric IP address and is used to access a website from client software.
• By default, the application will be hosted in non-SSL mode. If you want to configure SSL, we need to uncomment those lines for configuring the domain and SSL in the Nginx file.
• Here, we have uncommented the default server line in the Nginx config file. We can replace example.com with our domain name, define the path of the SSL certificate and specify the directory where the SSL certificate is located.

Comment the following marked line in the Nginx config file:

After installation completion, it will be redirected to the Bold Reports page as shown below.

Conclusion

I hope this blog provided a clear idea about how to deploy Bold Reports on Linux. I hope you enjoyed this webinar and that you’ll keep an eye out for future Bold Reports webinars.

Look at our demo samples and documentation site to learn more. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section. You can also contact us through our contact page or, if you already have an account, you can log in to ask your support question.

Bold Reports offers a 15-day free trial that does not require a credit card. We invite you to sign up and experience Bold Reports for yourself. Give it a try and let us know what you think!