Connect 2024 - User Manual

Installation on SAP BTP (Connect 2024)

The Connect Server can be hosted on a SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment. This chapter describes the procedure how to deploy the Connect Server on SAP BTP.

You can either create your own image and save it in a private Docker repository or obtain the current standard image from a Docker repository from Galileo Group AG.

Change the <docker_account_name> and <repository_name> values to your Docker account and private repository name from your Docker Hub account. The tag is optional. For example, you can choose the role of your SAP BTP subaccount, such as development, test, production, or anything else that suits your needs.

Push the Docker image to the hub using the following statement.

Deploy the Connect Server to SAP BTP

In order to deploy the docker image to SAP BTP open a shell and login to Cloud Foundry using the cf login statement. Then use the following statement to deploy the Docker image to Cloud Foundry.

The application should start immediately and the output of the cf push command should show the route to the application if everything works fine.

Use the image of the Galileo Group AG Docker Repository

As a prerequisite you must have installed the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface cf CLI. The cf CLI can be downloaded from GitHub.

Deploy the Connect Server to SAP BTP

Open a shell and use the following command to log in to your Cloud Foundry environment on SAP BTP.

The -a parameter specifies the API endpoint of the Cloud Foundry environment. You can find the API endpoint of your SAP BTP sub-account on the overview page of the sub-account in the Cloud Foundry section, see next screenshot.

Once you have successfully logged into your SAP BTP sub-account, use the following instructions to create a new app from an image of the Galileo Group AG Docker repository.

Please replace <app_name> in the above statement with a suitable name that meets your needs, e.g. connect_dev if you want to create a development instance of Connect Server. You can either replace <tag> with a version number, e.g. 2025.0.0, or use latest if you always want to have the latest version of the Connect Server.

Username and password are provided by Galieo Group AG. Please get in touch with your contact person to obtain read-only credentials for the Docker repository.

Bind a database to the application

After the image has been successfully deployed, the application attempts to start, but fails at this point because no information has yet been provided for the database to be used. Stop the application for the time being to set up the database connection.

To set up the database, first navigate to Service Bindings in the navigation area on the left-hand side of the application overview page. Click on the Bind Service button and select Service from the catalog. Click on Next.

On the next screen, search for the PostgreSQL service. Select this service and click Next to continue.

On the next screen, you can either create a new PostgreSQL instance or reuse an existing instance. If you create a new instance, start with 2 GB of storage space. Click Next and then confirm your choices.

If you have decided to create a new instance, the creation process will take some time. Once the database has been bound to the application, you will see a button for displaying sensitive data on the Service bindings page. In the sensitive data you will find the login information for a database user, the name of the database and its host and port.

From the sensitive data, the following information is needed.

  • username

  • password

  • hostname

  • dbname

  • port

Define customer-specific environment variables

After the database has been created and bound to the application, the application must know the connection string to the database, which can be realized with customer-specific environment variables.

Open a notepad and prepare a database connection string that should look like this:

Replace the placeholders in the connection string with the values from the sensitive data of the database.

Navigate to User-provided Variables of the application and create the following two variables.

  • DOTNET_Workspace__DataSource__DbType = PostgreSql

  • DOTNET_Workspace__DataSource__ConnectionString = the prepared connection string.

After creating the variables, the page should look like the screenshot below.

At this point, everything should be set up to start the application successfully. Go back to the application overview page and click on the Start button.