How to configure Activiti Explorer and REST to use the same database

If someone wants to merge the activiti-explorer and activiti-rest web application of Activiti 5.22, than this blog would be very useful for them.

There are few steps to deploy both web application together on a single process engine so that they can share database on single engine. 

I have found other approach on web to merge both the webs manually. As per my understanding it's a little bit challenging and not recommended for production environment. 

I have used below setups.

• Apache tomcat 8.0.27
• MySql 
• Activiti 5.22.0

Steps are:

1. Create Database in MySql (e.g activiti_exp_rest)
2. In new instance of tomcat, put a Activti-explorer war in webapps folder of Tomcat 
3. Start the tomcat and monitor the logs.
4. Shutdown the Server
5. Now go to [Tomcat]/webapps/activiti-rest/WEB-INF/classes and open files db.properties and activiti-custom-context.xml
6. 
7. In file db.properties, add the entry related to created db.
8. In file activiti-custom-context.xml, un-comment the beans to register dbProperties, datasource, transcationManager, processEngineConfiguration, processEngine and other services too.
9. Add the DB dialect in Tomcat]/lib
10. Start the tomcat and monitor the logs. Server should start without any problem.
11. Now to Deploy Activit-Rest on same server, Shutdown server again.
12. Put a Activti-restwar in webapps folder of Tomcat 
13. Repeat steps 3,4 and 5
14. Now open file engine.properties from [Tomcat]/webapps/webapps/activiti-rest/WEB-INF folder
15. We don't need to create again demo properties, make those false.
16. Start the tomcat and monitor the logs. 

Testing Steps:

1. Deployed a process using REST API
   
2. Verified in Activiti-Explorer UI
   
3. Verified in databases tables. 
   

Happy Learning.............

Thanks
Ratik Singhal