Running the Product

To run WSO2 API Manager, you start the API Manager server at the command line. You can then run the Management Console application to configure and manage the product. This page describes how to run the product in the following sections:

The Management Console uses the default HTTP-NIO transport, which is configured in the catalina-server.xml file in the <PRODUCT_HOME>/repository/conf/tomcat directory. This transport must be properly configured in this file for the Management Console to be accessible.

Starting the Server

To start the server, you run the script wso2server.bat (on Windows) or wso2server.sh (on Linux/Solaris) from the bin folder.

Open a command prompt:

On Windows, choose Start -> Run, type cmd at the prompt, and press Enter.
On Linux/Solaris, establish a SSH connection to the server or log in to the text Linux console.

Execute one of the following commands, where <APIM_HOME> is the directory where you installed the API Manager distribution:

On Windows: <APIM_HOME>/bin/wso2server.bat --run
On Linux/Solaris: sh <APIM_HOME>/bin/wso2server.sh

The operation log appears. When the API Manager server is running, the log displays the message "WSO2 Carbon started in 'n' seconds."

We do not recommend starting WSO2 products as a daemon, because there is a known issue that causes automatic restarts in the wrapper mode. Instead, you can configure the heap memory allocations in the wso2server.sh script and run it using the nohup command. For example:

nohup ./wso2server.sh &

Running the Management Console

Once the server has started, you can run the Management Console by opening a Web browser and typing in the management console's URL. You can find the URL in the start script's log. For example:

The URL should be in the following format: https://<Server Host>:9443/carbon

You can use this URL to access the Management Console on this computer from any other computer connected to the Internet or LAN. When accessing the Management Console from the same server where it's installed, you can type "localhost" instead of the IP address: https://localhost:9443/carbon

At the sign-in screen, sign in to the Management Console using admin as both the username and password. You can then use the Management Console to manage the API Manager. The tabs and menu items in the navigation pane on the left may vary depending on the features you have installed. To view information about a particular page, click the Help link at the top right corner of that page , or click the Docs link to open this documentation for full information on managing the API Manager.

If you leave the Management Console unattended for a defined time, its login session will time out. The default timeout value is 15 minutes, but you can change this in <APIM_HOME>/repository/conf/tomcat/carbon/WEB-INF/web.xml file as follows:

<session-config>
   <session-timeout>15</session-timeout>
</session-config>

When the Management Console Sign-in page appears, the web browser will typically display an "insecure connection" message, which requires your confirmation before you can continue.

The Management Console is based on HTTPS protocol, which is a combination of HTTP and SSL protocols. This protocol is generally used to encrypt the traffic from the client to server for security reasons. The certificate it works with is used for encryption only, and does not prove the server identity, so when you try to access the Management Console, a warning of untrusted connection is usually displayed. To continue working with this certificate, some steps should be taken to "accept" the certificate before access to the site is permitted. If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, this usually occurs only on the first access to the server, after which the certificate is stored in the browser database and marked as trusted. With other browsers, the insecure connection warning might be displayed every time you access the server.

This scenario is suitable for testing purposes, or for running the program on the company's internal networks. If you want to make the Management Console available to external users, your organization should obtain a certificate signed by a well-known certificate authority, which verifies that the server actually has the name it is accessed by and that this server actually belongs to the given organization.

Stopping the Server

To stop the server, press Ctrl+C in the command window, or click the Shutdown/Restart link in the navigation pane in the Management Console.