Alfresco Login Issues & How To Solve Them

[angelborroy]

The following UI errors are common for users evaluating Alfresco.

Since the error message may indicate that default credentials (admin/admin) are incorrect, in many cases the real problem is that Alfresco Repository (http://localhost:8080/alfresco) didn't start successfully.

Both share and content-app services requires alfresco one to work. When alfresco service is down, you are getting the previous error in the UI apps and also a repeated error in solr6 container log including the text java.net.UnknownHostException: alfresco

When using Docker Compose, you can use the Docker Desktop Containers option to verify if alfresco container is up & running.

A common cause is that resources are not enough, so verify that Docker has at least 16 GB of RAM assigned and that the file docker-compose.yml has a mem_limit greater than 3 GB for alfresco container.

services:
  alfresco:
    mem_limit: 3072m

That should be enough to solve this problem, just remember to re-start Docker Compose for Alfresco to apply this setting.

Docker Logs

If that is not enough, you may try identifying additonal problems in Docker logs. For instance, in the following sample, logs for alfresco container are inspected.

$ docker ps –a
aca3efc73538 nginx:stable-alpine Up4minutes f0c531e5c904 alfresco/alfresco-content-app:2.9.0 Up4minutes 025334b0d103 alfresco-docker-compose_alfresco Exited (137) ab2720e52680 postgres:13.3 Up4minutes
5f84759be28d alfresco-docker-compose_share
e86370121f16 alfresco-docker-compose_solr6
1253085f3cd3 alfresco/alfresco-activemq:5.16.1
602923f93a28 alfresco/alfresco-transform-core-aio:2.5.7 Up4minutes

$ docker logs 0253
Caused by: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out
at java.base/java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Native Method)
at java.base/java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead(SocketInputStream.java:115) at java.base/java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:168)
at java.base/java.net.SocketInputStream.read(SocketInputStream.java:140)
at java.base/java.io.BufferedInputStream.fill(BufferedInputStream.java:252)
at java.base/java.io.BufferedInputStream.read(BufferedInputStream.java:271)

Docker Probes

When all the containers are running as expected and no errors are shown in the logs, verifying that containers are working as expected can be achieved by using command line probes.

$ docker ps 

39430e57d961 alfresco-docker-compose_alfresco
aecdab105421 postgres:13.3
a3e1e577019b alfresco-docker-compose_solr6
c629e28e076b alfresco/alfresco-activemq:5.16.1
53aefbf83d79 alfresco/alfresco-transform-core-aio:2.5.7

$ docker exec 3943 bash -c "curl -s -o /dev/null --max-time 1 -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8080/alfresco/s/api/server"
200

$ docker exec aecd psql -U alfresco -c "select 1 where false" 
(0 rows)

$ docker exec 53ae bash -c "curl -s -o /dev/null --max-time 1 -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8090" 
200

$ docker exec c629 bash -c "curl -u admin:admin -L -s -o /dev/null --max-time 1 -w "%{http_code}" http://localhost:8161" 
200

$ docker exec a3e1 bash -c "curl -s -L -o /dev/null --max-time 1 -w "%{http_code}" \ --header "X-Alfresco-Search-Secret:secret" http://localhost:8983/solr"
200

Reminder

"Your authentication details haven't been recognized or
Alfresco Content Services may not be available at this time."

In many cases, this message is caused because Alfresco Repository didn't start sucessfully. Use any of the tools above to fix the problem.

Video Recording

Additional details and live coding is available in the next video.