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

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

Action

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.