KB-1632 Appian 18.2 fails to deploy on Weblogic with "appianHome cannot be null" error

Symptoms

Installing Appian 18.2 with Weblogic 12.2.1.3 results in an error of the following type:

<User defined listener com.appiancorp.rdbms.datasource.BusinessDataSourceValidator failed: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.appiancorp.suite.SuiteConfiguration.
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.appiancorp.suite.SuiteConfiguration at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
.
.
.
<Info> <ServletContext-/suite> <BEA-000000> <Closing Spring root WebApplicationContext> 
<Warning> <HTTP> <BEA-101162> <User defined listener com.appiancorp.rdbms.config.PrimaryDataSourceShutdown failed: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: appianHome cannot be null.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: appianHome cannot be null.

Cause

1. This issue has been reported to the Appian Product Team. The reference number for this issue is AN-109591.
2. This issue may also occur if the suite.ear has been customized and the location of the file has been modified in the process. This affects the absolute paths set within the suite.ear directory leading to the observed issue.

Action

1. Instead of deploying Appian to a Managed Server in Weblogic, deploy Appian to the default AdminServer.
2. Ensure that the customization does not modify the location of suite.ear.

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 18.2.