ThingWorx local development environment with Docker - Part 1

ThingWorx is a platform for developing “Industrial IoT solutions”. They’ve got a lot of interesting documentation on various setup guides but I wanted to document how to get one up and running locally in a few minutes for the express purposes of learning and experimentation.

A local setup doesn’t usually need all the heavy duty resilience and redundancy requirements that come with setting up a production environment. Unfortunately, while ThingWorx has plenty of documentation on setting up a production instance they don’t have a whole lot of documentation on quickly spinning up a local environment for experiementation.

What is the ThingWorx architecture?

There are three basic components in ThingWorx documented here and they are:

1. Things/Devices/Users/Clients
2. ThingWorx Foundation
3. Database

The ThingWorx Foundation application is a Java web application designed to be hosted with Apache Tomcat. The database you choose to use with ThingWorx is somewhat up to you. Any database that provides a JDBC driver and is ANSI SQL capable should work, although the officially distributed installers will make it easier if you’re using either PostgreSQL, MS SQL, or Azure SQL.

All of this looks like it’s VERY dockerizable.

Are there other attempts out there to do this with Docker?

There are of course the official Docker implementations mentioned in the installation guide here. These are a little overkill for our needs though.

A quick Google search yielded up Foxoncz/docker-thingworx which he describes as being a “Simple dev setup for ThingWorx.” Sounds perfect for our requirements! Let’s give it a shot!

Experimenting

Well… the first problem with this repo… there’s no documentation on how we should use it…

There is a folder called tw (probably short for ThingWorx). The folder contains a a single empty file named UNPACK_TW_HERE.txt. Seems like the developer probably wanted us to unpack ThingWorx there. Now… lots of questions left. There are multiple versions of ThingWorx available for download. Which one should we unpack there? Let’s keep exploring and see if we can figure that out.

There appear to be two docker files and a docker-compose.yml file that connects the two of them.

Dockerfile 1 - Dockerfile.postgres

Dockerfile.postgres a very simple file seems to be the container for our database and does three things:

1. Copies the contents of /tw/install/ into the container
2. Sets the twpg_init.sh script as the entrypoint script
3. Creates the basic ThingWorx storage folders and appropriate permissions

FROM postgres:9.6.5

COPY /tw/install/ /twpginit/
COPY /twpg_init.sh /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/

RUN mkdir /ThingworxPostgresqlStorage && \
    chmod 775 /ThingworxPostgresqlStorage  && \
    chown postgres:postgres /ThingworxPostgresqlStorage

Dockerfile 2 - Dockerfile.tomcat

Dockerfile.tomcat is also a very small file that is going to host our Tomcat server. It does three very similar things:

1. Copies the ThingWorx war file into the tomcat webapps folder
2. Copies the ThingWorx platform-settings.json file into the appropriate folder in the container
3. Creates the basic Thingworx storage folders and appropriate permissions

What’s next?

Based on the examination of those two files I’m guessing we should be extracting the ThingWorx Postgre installation option down into the tw folder and then just run docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up. Let’s see what happens!

Our first go at it

The documentation in the repo didn’t give any specifics on what version of ThingWorx should be used, but the latest is the greatest so let’s try downloading 9.5.

I already downloaded [Rancher Desktop][https://rancherdesktop.io/] and validated everything in Docker land is working right by running docker run hello-world.

I downloaded the zip file containing ThingWorx Postgres and extracted it to the tw folder and then I ran docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up.

This is what I got…

Exceptions! Exceptions everywhere! Haha… to be expected I suppose. It seems we’ll likely have to build our own. See you in the next post in this series!