Installation and Troubleshooting FAQs

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How do I install Roller? #1

See the Roller Installation Guide, available from the documentation link on the Roller website.

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What platforms are supported? #2

"Supported" might be the wrong word because we don't really offer support, but we can tell you what platforms are known to work.

Roller 5 will work on Tomcat 6 and 7 (it has not been tested on Roller 8 but should work there also), Glassfish 3.0 and 3.1, JBoss AS 6 and WebSphere 8. It should also work with MySQL, Derby, Oracle and DB2 databases.

Roller 5.1 requires minimum JDK 7 and Tomcat 7 or 8 (as it uses Servlet 3.0), it has also been shown to run successfully with recent versions of GlassFish and JBoss.  We've tested with MySQL, Derby and PostSQL databases; scripts are also available for Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server databases but we have not tested with them.

Tomcat is probably the safest platform for Roller because that's what most people use.

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How do I set up an administrative user for my Roller install? #8

The very first user you create will be an admin user. That initial user can then grant and revoke admin rights from any other user.

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I get an "Illegal mix of collations" error from MySQL. What's wrong? #11

You probably missed the instructions in the Roller Install Guide to set up UTF-8 as the default character encoding, check that guide for precise database creation scripts to use.  The MySQL Reference Manual has more information.

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Why do I sometimes see a log message "PingQueueProcessor:processQueue | WARNING Skipping current ping queue processing round because we cannot yet determine the site's absolute context url". What does this mean and do I need to do anything about it? #14

This warning appears if the ping queue processor task runs before there have been any requests made to the server and you have not set an explicit site URL in the configuration.

Due to a quirk/limitation of the Servlet API, the webapp is unable to determine the absolute context url unless it is set explicitly in the configuration or until after the first request. It needs the full site url to determine the urls to put in outbound pings. If it can't determine it, it logs this and skips one round of ping processing.

The ping queue processor task runs every five minutes by default. You'll see one of these each time the ping queue task runs until at least one request has been received by Roller.

Most production environments will never see this. You might see this in trial and development if start the server and just let it sit there for awhile. You shouldn't see them after you start doing stuff.

You don't have to do anything about it; things should be fine as soon as your server starts to see any activity. However, you can avoid the message by setting your absolute site url explicitly in "Absolute URL to Site" field in the configuration under "Admin | Configuration".