Getting Started - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 21

degradation. When you start to do more serious work, make sure the important
locations are included in your backup.

We will refer to the installation directory as $EXIST_HOME throughout this
topic.

Data directory
This is the directory where eXist stores the content of its database. The installer
will propose a default that's inside eXist's installation directory ( $EXIST_HOME/
webapp/WEB-INF/data , to be precise). If you just plan to play around a bit or do
some development work, keep the default. You can always change it later.
However, if things get serious, like on a production server, make sure that this
directory is writable, located on a volume that is sufficiently fast for updates, and
backed up (which is not always the case for program file directories).

Administrator password
The installer will ask you to provide an administrator password. This is not your
operating system's administrator password, but the initial password used for
eXist's administrator's account (called admin ). You are strongly encouraged to set
an administrator password on all installations of eXist. If you don't, eXist will use
an empty password, so anyone who tries an empty password would have full
access to your eXist instance.

Memory settings
The installer allows you to set the amount of memory reserved for eXist's JVM
and its internal cache. Common settings are shown in Table 2-1 .

Table 2-1. eXist installation memory settings

Max memory Cache memory Remarks

512 MB 64 MB Don't go any lower than this, or eXist will not run properly.

1,024 MB 128 MB This is the default setting and is fine for small development use.

2,048 MB 256 MB If your machine has enough memory to spare, then use at least this.

Packages/apps to install
For getting started purposes, we recommend keeping everything checked (this
topic assumes that you did!).