Deploying UniGUI to Ubuntu

[Scooter]

I've been using UniGUI for roughly two years now with no issues. However, I now have a requirement to deploy onto an Ubuntu Server and here is where I've hit some snags.

I followed the process linked on this page, with only partial success:
http://www.unigui.com/doc/online_help/index.html?linux64.htm

The version I'm using is 1.90.0.1558

The good news is that after about two hours of troubleshooting I finally managed to get my app to run on Ubuntu, and was able to access the web page from a remote computer. However, I am experiencing some issues and was hoping that someone might have already ran into a similar situation and had a solution.

1. Although the PAServer (ver 22.0) is running on the Ubuntu Server, when I press F9 in Delphi the app builds but does not get pushed to the Ubuntu Server (the web site above states that pressing F9 should push the binary to the server and launch it). The app does not launch, nor do any files get pushed from my Windows Dev PC to Ubuntu. In order to test the web site, I have to manually copy the project binary over to the Ubuntu Server each time I make changes.

2. Although I added the required ServerModule code to set FrameworkFilesRoot to '/etc/fmsoft/unigui/unigui_runtime', and then of course copied the appropriate files there - the UniGUI log on Ubuntu showed me that many files could not be found when the app was launched. When the app started the web page never showed up (due to the files not being found). By reviewing the log I was able to resolve this issue by identifying that the missing files seemed to all be located in /etc/fmsoft/unigui/unigui_runtime. I copied all the files from uni-1.90.0.1558 to the /uni folder which the log showed that UniGUI is expecting the files to be located. I see that in the Server Module there is a parameter called 'UniRoot' which is set to '[uni]\', which is where I am assuming the /uni folder is coming from.

The bottom line is that I managed to get UniGUI running on my Ubuntu Server, but the whole development process not very solid. I'm concerned that as I add components to my web site, that I'll be constantly having to review the logs to see where I need to manually copy files.

I think my immediate work around is going to be developing my web app targeting Windows, and then when I'm ready to deploy to Linux I'll have to carefully monitor the log file to observe if I need to copy files.

Note that I did validate that the PAServer was working as expected by building a FireMonkey application, I then targeted Linux and when I press F9 the app gets pushed to the Ubuntu Server and launches.

I still stand behind UniGUI and hope that my experience is easily resolved.

Kelly

[Scooter]

UPDATE:

I decided to deploy a new Ubuntu Server, and this has fixed some of the issues.

In order to get UniGUI to work correctly, I had to perform the following on the fresh Ubuntu 22.04 install:

• apt install zlib1g-dev
• add-apt-repository universe
• apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5:i386

Pressing F9 still does not launch the application. However, I no longer need to manually copy any of the UniGUI files to new directories. All I have to manually copy over is the application binary. I copy this over, and when launched it creates a few folders (log, cache, files, temp)

 

Kelly