So you have reached the point where you have gotten comfortable with Flux and are implementing little comfort settings to better suit your style. This article will cover a large customization by walking through changing the skin for the Operations Console. The Operations Console is arguably the most used feature of Flux, so by changing its appearance, you will be changing the appearance of a majority of what is used.

Designing the new Skin

As should be obvious, to change the skin on the Ops Console, a skin must first be designed to change into. A good place to begin is to unpack the flux.war file provided in the webapp folder into a different folder. Extracting files from the war file is easy, just copy the flux.war file into a newly created folder (to keep things clean) and use the command:

jar -xvf flux.war

There should now be a skins directory where the extraction took place. Inside the skins directory there are two additional folders - default which is the default skin (this is currently being used by the Flux Ops Console) and foo which is an additional skin that was made to demonstrate Flux's skinning ability.

Basically from here you will need to duplicate one of these two folders with a new name and precede making altercations. You will need to preserve directory integrity and make modifications to the files you want to have a different look.

After your new skin has been designed, repack the war file using the following command from within the base of the directory you exploded your flux.war file into.

jar -cf flux.war *

Move the new flux.war file back into the webapp folder and then run the configure.bat or configure.sh script in the base directory of your Flux install. Your new skin is now neatly bundled with the rest of the webapp files.

Applying the new skin

There is only one small change to be made to enable the new skin. You will need to open the .fluxwebapp.properties file – this is located either in the Documents and Settings/{user that installed flux} directory in Windows or the /home/{user that installed flux} directory on Linux. Using a text editor of your choice, change the line that reads "skin=default" to be "skin={directory of skin you want to change to}". If you want to change to the included "foo" skin for example, change the line to read "skin=foo".

That is all there is to it. From here, just restart your webapp and the ops console will start with the skin that you designated.