Install Pentaho BI-Server CE 5.0.1 on OSX/Windows/Ubuntu

Pentaho Business Intelligence Server (BI-Server) is an advanced reporting platform that can be used for reporting, delivering drill through dashboards and analyze all sorts of data. The Pentaho BI-Server comes in two flavours, the enterprise edition and a community edition. In this post I want to share the steps that I took to install Pentaho BI-Server CE on different test environments: OS X 10.7, Ubuntu 13.10 and Windows.

Step 1: Install Java and set the JAVA_HOME variable

Pentaho BI-Server CE 5.0.1 is developed in java and makes use of Apache Tomcat. So the first thing I had to make sure was if Java is installed on my machine. To determine if Java is installed followed the next steps:

 1. Open a terminal (OSX/Ubuntu) or command (Windows) window;  
 2. Type: java -version and press 'Enter'.  

If you get a result like java version "1.6.0_65" java is probably installed on your machine. If not, then you should download and install java on your machine first.

Next, when you have java installed on your machine, you have to set the JAVA_HOME variable. To check if the JAVA_HOME is set, use the following:

OS X/Ubuntu

 1. Open a terminal window;  
 2. Type: echo $JAVA_HOME and press 'Enter'.  

Windows

 1. Open a command prompt window;  
 2. Type: set JAVA_HOME and press 'Enter'.  

When the JAVA_HOME variable is set, you should see a path. If not, then you should set the variable. There are a lot of tutorials and how to's out there that can help you, so I will not cover that in this blogpost.

Step 2: Download Pentaho BI-Server CE

After you have installed java and set the JAVA_HOME variable, it is time to download Pentaho BI-Server CE 5.0.1. For OS X and Windows, select the download button on the Pentaho community page and store the zip file in a location of your choice. Then extract the zip file to a location of your choice. On OS X you can choose a location like: /Applications/biserver-ce. On Windows you can choose a location like: C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce. On Ubuntu, you can follow the next steps to download and install Pentaho BI-Server CE 5.0.1.

 1. Open a terminal window;  
 2. Type: wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/pentaho/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/5.0.1-stable/biserver-ce-5.0.1-stable.zip and press 'Enter'.  

After pressing Enter, Ubuntu will start downloading the zip file. When you finished downloading, use the next command to extract the zip file:

 1. Open a terminal window (if it is not still open from the previous step);  
 2. Type: sudo unzip biserver-ce-5.0.1-stable.zip -d /opt/pentaho and press 'Enter'.  

Step 3: Start Pentaho BI-Server CE

Now that you have unpacked the zip file to a location of your choice, it's time to start the Pentaho BI-Server.

OS X/Ubuntu

 1. Open a terminal window;  
 2. Go to biserver-ce folder;  
 3. Type: ./start-pentaho.sh and press 'Enter'.  

Windows

 1. Open a command prompt window;  
 2. Go to biserver-ce folder;  
 3. Type: start-pentaho.bat and press 'Enter'.  

If all went well, Tomcat and the Pentaho BI-Server should now be running. Now, open a webbrowser and go to: 'http://localhost:8080/Pentaho'. You should see the Pentaho BI-Server login screen.