There is documentation on Creatio’s site that details how to perform an on-premise installation of a Creatio environment. Largely for performance reasons, this requires a minimum of three servers, one of which (the caching server) must be a Linux machine. However, if you are just making a test environment that will not actually have to support multiple users, it is possible to set everything up on a single Windows server. This is certainly not recommended if performance is at all important, but works well enough to test customizations even on a relatively modest server. Note that this will entail installing various components from Creatio, Microsoft, and third-parties.
If you log into Creatio’s Academy website (you will need to set up a login there), you can find the standard install procedure here. We will be largely using this same procedure to install the test server, with a few important differences due to the single server. I will be using SQL as the database in this example, but you should be able to employ one of the other supported databases if desired.
We will be using a single Windows server for this installation. It needs to be a full version of Windows Server to get all of the web components we need. Window Server 2019 or later is required by Creatio 8.14 (which is the one I tested with). You will need to download the Creatio files directly from Creatio. They include the database you need to attach, and the files needed by IIS. Sadly, I have no link for you, as they don’t have the on-premise install publicly available on their site. The easiest way to get the the files would be to email support@creatio.com and tell let them know you wish to set up an on-premise test system.
Once you have downloaded the .ZIP file with the Creatio deployment, you will need to extract it to the folder from which you wish to publish it in IIS. I like to use C:\inetpub\Creatio, but you may use any folder you like.
For step 1 on the list of deployment activities, rather that set up a separate caching server, we will install a Windows Redis emulator. I know of no commercial options for this, so we are forced to rely on solutions independent developers have made available. The two solutions which have been recommended to me can be downloaded here or here. Download and install either one of these (not both, I used the first one in testing) and you will have Redis server Creatio can use. You will not need to do much configuration of REDIS, just be able to point Creatio at it.
The database deployment in Step 2 is as listed, using SQL if you are exactly following along with my procedure. For step 3, there are some addendums. I would suggest adding the server roles first. For a stand-only server, we need to install all of the IIS roles, excluding only WebDAV and FTP roles. Do not exclude the other roles the Creatio documentation has you exclude for a production server. Also install all of the .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.7 roles. Now download an install the components from the beginning of step 3.
Steps 4 through 7 can be performed as they appear in Creatio’s documentation. When setting up IIS, be sure to to adjust for the folder path you chose when you extracted the deployment files. Also, if you plan to use port 80, you will need to either stop or delete altogether the default website, so it does not conflict with the Creatio site.
For a test server, most or all of the additional setup items listed in the documentation would not be necessary, depending on what sort of testing you will be doing. You should now have a functioning test server. The default password for the Supervisor account is Supervisor. If you change this, you will want to make sure to document the new password. (I learned this the hard way the first time I set up a Creatio server.)
