DRAFT KB-XXXX 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:

<Warning> <HTTP> <BEA-101162> <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) 
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.
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<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

This issue has been reported to the Appian Product Team. The reference number for this issue is AN-109591.

Workaround

Instead of deploying Appian to a Managed Server in Weblogic, deploy Appian to the default Adminserver.

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 18.2