This section helps you to install Alfresco Community Edition, additional software, and modules.

Community Edition consists of a number of modules that need to be deployed and configured together, to form the complete services platform. This provides customers with the flexibility to configure their deployment architecture in the way that is consistent with their IT strategy.

Alfresco deployment requires a number of infrastructure components to be in place, on which the core platform components are installed, and extended by several optional components which provide additional services.

The following diagram shows the key components of a typical Content Services installation:

Installation can be done manually, but Alfresco also provides a number of installation and deployment scripts for the most commonly used deployment tools to help customers accelerate the deployment process.

Install and deploy methods

There are four distinct approaches to deploying Community Edition. Familiarize yourself with the Deployment and Containerization Support Policy, before selecting one of the options below.

These deployment methods apply to both Enterprise and Community editions.

Non-containerized deployment

Manual installation

This is also referred to as the zip distribution deployment, and is the most flexible way of manually deploying all the required components. This method is recommended for customers and partners who require complete control over the installation process.

See Install with zip for more details.

Ansible playbooks

Ansible playbooks provide an automated way of deploying a complete Community Edition system on “bare metal” servers, Virtual Machines, or Virtual Private Cloud instances, without the use of containers. The single playbook provided can be configured to deploy single or multi-machine instances, with a number of supported configuration options.

See Install using Ansible for basic instructions on deploying with Ansible.

To explore more technical information on the ACS playbook, and to access the playbook source, see Ansible on GitHub.

The ACS Ansible playbook is provided as an Open Source reference script, which customers can modify and enhance to suit their own deployment environments.

Containerized deployment

Containers provide an alternative method for deploying Content Services using pre-configured Docker images for each of the platform’s components. Containerized deployment is best suited for larger implementations, in organizations who have significant experience in the use of deployment tools such as Docker or Kubernetes.

Alfresco provides reference scripts, in the form of Docker Compose files and Helm charts, which customers can use as examples to construct their own individual deployment scripts. These scripts are not designed to be used “as-is” to deploy production environments.

See Containers overview for an introduction to using Alfresco containers.

Docker Compose

Alfresco provides Docker Compose files, which are best suited for the quick deployment of development and test instances of Content Services using Docker. Customers who would like to deploy their production environments using docker-compose files, can extend and adapt the provided script as necessary.

See Install using Docker Compose for instructions.

See Docker Compose on GitHub for additional technical information.

Helm charts

Important: Kubernetes clusters are powerful but complex to deploy and manage. Alfresco recommends that only customers with significant experience in cloud environments such as Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and strong competencies in containerized deployments, should use this deployment method.

Helm charts are the most common way of deploying Content Services in orchestrated Kubernetes environments. The Helm charts from Alfresco have been developed and tested using AWS EKS and Docker for Desktop (in Kubernetes mode), but do not use specific Amazon services. As such they can easily be adapted to other Kubernetes environments from different cloud providers.

See Install using Helm for instructions.

See Helm charts on GitHub for additional technical information.

Upgrade existing installations

See Upgrade Community Edition for information on how to upgrade existing installations to newer versions of the software.