Adapt Learning Community: Installing the Adapt Authoring Tool (AAT) on Windows Server 2019

Installing Adapt Authoring on Windows Server 2019.pdf

Hello everyone,

My first post here and I thought I would start with a contribution instead of a question (it is usually the other way round for me for sure).

I recently installed version 0.10.4 of the Adapt Authoring Tool (AAT) using Adapt Framework version 5.7.0 on a freshly installed Windows Server 2019 virtual machine. I made some notes along the way and have attached them as a PDF.

Hopefully someone might find them useful.

BTW you can download a 180 day evaluation ISO from Microsoft's website - that is what I did. I have this running on a VMWare host with one virtual CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 80GB harddrive.

Let me know if there are any errors or if you have suggestions for improvements.

My next plan is to use these notes as the basis of a module. Wish me luck!

Best regards,

-Andy Cranston.

Thanks for this, Andy! I know we've had a few people on here asking about installing the AAT on Windows Server so hopefully this will prove very useful to those struggling with this.

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Glad to offer any help I can - rest assured I will be asking plenty of questions of my own :-]

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Having just gone through a similar process, albeit on a Linux server, I can say these are good notes! and I wish i'd seen them earlier.

Does your solution enable Adapt Authoring Tool remote login via public web?

I tried to do that on my server, but could not find any documentation on how to enable remote authentication.

When I browse to the relevant URL from another machine, I see a message "system status... non authenticated" (or similar) which I believe is coming from Adapt Authoring Tool server. But I don't get any login UI.

Do you have any notes or docs on enabling remote access please?

thanks!

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Thank you for your kind words James.

I have not got as far as accessing via the public web. However, here are some thoughts on what you might need to do:

If your AAT server is behind a firewall then some new firewall rules to allow access are probably required. I am not an expert in this area but a web search on "port forwarding" is probably a good start.
If your AAT server has its own firewall (Windows server does) you might need additional rules to allow access from hosts on other subnets and not just the local subnet.
Make sure your AAT server is fully "hardened" if it is being exposed to the internet. This would involve shutting down all but essential services and only letting through IP traffic from sources that absolutely need access.
Consider running the web service on port 443 (https) instead of port 80 (http) so traffic is encrypted. Look into getting a digital certificate. https://letsencrypt.org/ is a good starting point.

As for the "system status... not authenticated" message. Is it the browser displaying this message or is it being output by the "node server" command? Either way is the other machine on the same or different subnet from the AAT server? Again firewall rules on the AAT server might have something to do with this. Also there might be configuration options in the node server change need to be changed.

-Andy.

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