Introducing the OpenACH Appliance

Now its easier than ever to set started in ACH processing! We have put together a virtual machine with the OpenACH platform pre-installed so that you can get an OpenACH appliance up and running with minimal effort. Lovingly named "The Originator", this virtual machine has versions available for Xen, QEMU, VirtualBox, Vmware and Hyper-V.

Test-Drive, Develop, Test and Production Installs

Whether you are integrating with OpenACH via our REST-ful APIs, or simply want to take it out for a spin and look under the hood - from develop to test to production, The Originator is the easiest way to get OpenACH up and running on your network. The Originator comes with:

Ubuntu 12.04.3 pre-installed on the virtual machine
Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, and all other required packages installed
Built-in setup script to update to development or release versions of the platform, as well as initialize your configuration
OpenACH set up in a non-intrusive way that allows other web apps or software to be installed with it on the box (e.g., third party APIs, development software, etc.)
Flexible and reliable enough for demo, proof of concept, development, testing and production (Note that appropriate firewalls, application tuning and hardening should be done prior to using The Originator to host a production installation.)

Downloads

The Originator downloads are available via SourceForge at the links below. By downloading and using The Originator, you agree to the OpenACH license (http://openach.com/community/license.txt) and licensing for all other software installed on the virtual machine (including but not limited to Yii Framework, PostgreSQL, Apache 2.0, and PHP).

Getting Started

After downloading The Originator virtual machine, load the image into your virtual machine host, following the standard procedure for your software to import an existing virtual machine image. You will want to make sure that it has Internet access (to download any updates), and an appropriate amount of memory for your particular application. For prototyping and test-driving, we typically use around 1GB, while for testing and production with larger transaction volume, 4GB works well. After configuring, boot your virtual machine.

You should see a standard Ubuntu login prompt. The Originator comes pre-configured with one user account that "owns" and manages the OpenACH installation. Access the account as follows:

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS openach login: openach Password: originate! Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Next, run the setup script:
openach:~$ ./setup.sh This script will set up your OpenACH server appliance for the first time. Are you sure you want to do this? (yes/no): yes Continuing with OpenACH appliance setup... . . . . . Backing up current configuration to /home/openach/backup-config/openach-config-backup-... . . . . . Backing up current install to /home/openach/backup-install/openach-backup-... Would you like to update to the latest development version of OpenACH? (yes/no): no Would you like to update to the latest production version of OpenACH? (yes/no): yes . . . Would you like to have new random encryption and validation keys built? WARNING! This will render your current data useless! (yes/no): yes . . . . . Created new keys and saved them into /home/www/openach/protected/config/security.php Would you like to reset the database password? (yes/no): no Would you like to load the latest FedACH and Fedwire data? (yes/no): no Would you like to load the latest OFAC data? (yes/no): no Setting file permissions required by Yii. Setup complete. Please refer to the Getting Started documentation at http://openach.com/books/getting-started for more information of what to do next.