Installation guide

Installation Guide for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

This guide describes the installation of Cortex from binaries.

1. Minimal Ubuntu Installation

Install a minimal Ubuntu 16.04 server system with the following software:

• Java runtime environment 1.8+ (JRE)

Make sure your system is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

2. Install a Java Virtual Machine

You can install either Oracle Java or OpenJDK.

2.1. Oracle Java

echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webupd8team/java/ubuntu trusty main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/java.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-key EEA14886
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Once Oracle Java is installed, go directly to section 3. Install and Prepare your Database.

2.2 OpenJDK

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless

3. Install Cortex

4.1. Install from Binaries

Binaries must be downloaded from https://dl.bintray.com/cert-bdf/cortex/cortex-latest.zip. The archive includes the back-end and the front-end.

You can install Cortex wherever you want on the filesystem. In this guide, we decided to set it in /opt.

cd /opt
wget https://dl.bintray.com/cert-bdf/cortex/cortex-latest.zip
unzip cortex-latest.zip
ln -s cortex-x.x.x cortex

4.2. Configuration

The configuration has two parts: configuration of Cortex back-end and analyzers. The latter is covered in the analyzers section

The only required parameter in order to start Cortex is the key of the server (play.crypto.secret). This key is used to authenticate cookies that contain data, and not only a session id. If Cortex runs in cluster mode, all instance must share the same key. You should generate a random key using the following command line:

sudo mkdir /etc/cortex
(cat << _EOF_
# Secret key
# ~~~~~
# The secret key is used to secure cryptographics functions.
# If you deploy your application to several instances be sure to use the same key!
play.crypto.secret="$(cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | fold -w 64 | head -n 1)"
_EOF_
) | sudo tee -a /etc/cortex/application.conf
sudo chgrp cortex /etc/cortex/application.conf
sudo chmod 640 /etc/cortex/application.conf

4.3. First start

Change your current directory to Cortex installation directory (/opt in this guide), then execute:

bin/cortex -Dconfig.file=/etc/cortex/application.conf

It is recommended to use a dedicated non-privilege user to start Cortex. If so, make sure that your user can create log file in /opt/cortex/logs

This command starts an HTTP service on port 9000/tcp. You can change the port by adding "http.port=8080" in the configuration file or add the "-Dhttp.port=8080" parameter to the command line. If you run Cortex using a non-privileged user, you can't bind a port under 1024.

If you'd rather start the application as a service, do the following:

sudo addgroup cortex
sudo adduser --system cortex
sudo cp /opt/cortex/install/cortex.service /usr/lib/systemd/system
sudo chown -R cortex:cortex /opt/cortex
sudo systemctl enable cortex
sudo service cortex start

Please note that the service may take some time to start.

Then open your browser and connect to http://YOUR_SERVER_ADDRESS:9000/

5. Update

To update Cortex from binaries, just stop the service, download the latest package, rebuild the link /opt/cortex and restart the service.

service cortex stop
cd /opt
wget https://dl.bintray.com/cert-bdf/cortex/cortex-latest.zip
unzip cortex-latest.zip
rm /opt/cortex && ln -s cortex-x.x.x cortex
chown -R cortex:cortex /opt/cortex /opt/cortex-x.x.x
service cortex start