Hello and welcome to our first post about ARAS Innovator. We will show you a simple example of how to run ARAS Innovator within a Docker container.

Our goal is to make ARAS Innovator customization more effective, and this is just the beginning.

When customizing ARAS Innovator, I used a Virtual Machine. Before executing some risky operations on my ARAS instance, I usually make a snapshot of my VM. In case of an error, I go back to my last snapshot, correct the failure and start over again. Regardless of how fast my computer was, it felt slow and clunky especially when the guest OS is Windows.

As ARAS Innovator is disrupting the PLM space, Docker is disrupting the virtualization space for several years now. If we want to customize ARAS effectively we need virtualization, so why not try Docker.

Prerequisites

Up and running

  • Check out or download the git repository.
  • Unzip the database files at the same place where the zip files are.
  • Replace <your mac address> with the MAC address you used for obtaining your ARAS Innovator license within the docker-compose.yml file.
version: '3.7'

services:
  innovator:
    image: softwarevisions/innovator-ce-app
    container_name: innovator-app
    ports:
      - 80:80
    mac_address: <your mac address>
    volumes:
      - ./conf:C:/inetpub/wwwroot/conf/

  db:
    image: softwarevisions/innovator-ce-db
    container_name: innovator-db
    ports:
      - 1433:1433
    volumes:
      - ./db/content:C:/temp/
    environment:
      sa_password: 'innovator1280++'
      attach_dbs: '[{"dbName":"InnovatorSolutions","dbFiles":["C:\\temp\\InnovatorSolutions.mdf","C:\\temp\\InnovatorSolutions_log.ldf"]}]'
ACCEPT_EULA: y
  • Replace the license element from the InnovatorServerConfig.xml with the license information you got from ARAS.
<!-- your license comes here  -->
<License lic_type="Unlimited" lic_key="" act_key="" company=""/>
  • Open the PowerShell console and navigate to the docker-compose.yml file.
  • Execute the following command in the PowerShell
docker-compose up -d

You can now visit the Innovator site as usual under the location http://localhost/InnovatorServer/Client/default.aspx.