Programming Languages, System Administration

How to install Groovy on Linux system-wide

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Groovy Logo
Image by Zorak1103 – CC BY-SA 3.0

(see section UPDATE at the bottom of the post to install Groovy using sdkman)

A colleague of mine recently asked me to install the Groovy programming language on our Red Hat 6.5 server and to make it accessible to all users. I thought it would be a very straightforward task but a quick search on the Red Hat 6.5 official repositories didn’t return any package for Groovy.

The easiest way to install Groovy manually is via gvm. I followed this  procedure to do it:

  1. Log in as root
sudo -i

2.  Retrieve the gvm install script and store it in a temporary file

curl –s get.gvmtool.net > /tmp/gvm.sh

3. Make the temporary file executable

chmod +x /tmp/gvm.sh

4. Run the install script

./tmp/gvm.sh

5. Complete the installation as requested at prompt

source "/root/.gvm/bin/gvm-init.sh"

6. Check that gvm is installed (this should return the help message explaining how to use gvm)

gvm help

7. Remove the temporary install script

rm /tmp/gvm.sh

8. Install groovy via gvm

gvm install groovy

9. Select the current version of groovy as default (at the time of writing version 2.4.3)  and check that groovy is installed

groovy -version
Groovy Version: 2.4.3 JVM: 1.7.0_79 Vendor: Oracle Corporation OS: Linux

10. Create a symlink to use groovy system-wide

ln -s /root/.gvm/groovy/current/bin/groovy /usr/bin/groovy

11. Exit the root user

exit

12. Check that groovy is installed system-wide

whereis groovy
groovy: /usr/bin/groovy

 

UPDATE:

Recently I had to install groovy on other Linux systems and discovered that that it is now much easier using sdkman, which is the evolution of gvm. This is the procedure to follow:

  1. Make sure you have Java installed by running:
java -version

If you don’t have Java, follow these instructions to install the default JRE/JDK or Oracle JDK.

2.  Install sdkman and set it up:

curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash
source "/home/cirulls/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"

3. Check that sdkman is correctly installed:

sdk version

4. Install groovy:

sdk install groovy

5. Check that groovy is correctly installed:

groovy -version

 

Happy grooving!

System Administration

How to change timezone on a Linux server

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Time Zone
Image by deckhand – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Every year in March and in October the clock changes in most countries for energy saving purposes. This has the annoying effect of messing up the current time on your server if the timezone is not set properly. Servers in Europe are often set up to UTC time. For example my web hosting provider explicitly says:

Note that any times specified are executed in the timezone of the server, and not your local timezone. Accordingly, you may need to make allowance for this when selecting when to run your cron job. Our servers run in the ‘UTC’ timezone because our client base is global, and it remains constant throughout the year with no changes for daylight saving.

This is a bit annoying for cron jobs as you need to do some calculations in case you want to run them at a specific local time.

Even if you don’t have sudo rights on your server, you can at least modify the time for a given user. For example, to change the timezone for the current user to a local time (e.g.  Europe/London)  run the following command and add it to your bash_profile to make the change permanent:

export TZ="Europe/London"

If you have full control on your server, you can change the timezone system-wide by symlinking /etc/localtime to the appropriate file in /usr/share/zoneinfo. For example, to set the timezone system-wide to the local time in Paris:

ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris /etc/localtime

If you run Red Hat/CentOS, you may also need edit /etc/sysconfig/clock in a similar way.

System Administration

How to add a new user with sudo rights

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Sudo Sandwich
Image by xkcd – CC BY-NC 2.5

Let’s say you have a new user needing sudo access to a Linux server. How do you grant him/her this great privilege? First, explain to the new user that sudo rights allow to do pretty much anything on a Linux machine – including screwing everything up! – and that with greater power also comes  greater responsibilities. Then, follow this procedure:

1. Open the command line

2. Create a new user (e.g. newusername) and add it to group wheel (members of this group have sudo rights):

sudo useradd -G wheel newusername

3. Set up the password for the new user. First, login as root:

sudo -i

Then set the password for the new user (e.g. newusername):

passwd newusername

Finally exit from root with:

exit

4. Test the newly created user and password by logging in as user newusername:

su - newusername

5. Test that the newly created user is in group wheel:

groups newusername