Local SAP Test Environment – ERPL - Connect DuckDB to the SAP ecosystem

Introduction to the ABAP Trial Environment

SAP provides a downloadable, free ABAP Platform on SAP HANA 2.0, which serves as an excellent sandbox for exploring ABAP language and tools. This trial environment comes fully equipped with SAP Fiori launchpad, SAP Cloud Connector, pre-configured connections, roles, and demo applications, offering a rich, hands-on experience.

Alternative Trial Options

While the Docker-based ABAP trial environment offers a straightforward setup, alternative options exist for establishing a local SAP test environment. Consider the SAP NetWeaver Developer Edition or the SAP Cloud Appliance Library for more flexibility and features.

What makes the ABAP trial environment so interesting is that it is a fully functional SAP system that you can run on your local machine. This allows you to try out the ERPL functionality without the need to connect to a remote system. For the ERPL extension, all relevant functionality is included:

We can download tables via our read table interface.
We have a plenty of BAPIs and RFCs to try out the BAPI interface.
The trial version contains the ABAP Flight Reference Scenario which we use throughout the examples documentation.
It includes a fully working SAP Business Warehouse (BW) to try out the ERPL’s BW cube & query interface.
And we also have of course ODP interfaces to S/4 CDS views but also to BW objects. You can try to query and replicate data from the ODP interface.

Clone the ERPL repository

Go to the ERPL repository and clone the repository to your local machine. In case you are not familiar with git or GitHub, you can also download the repository as a ZIP file.

When you are already there, don’t forget to give our repo a ★ star.

Update SAP ABAP Trial Licensing

The ABAP license supplied with the Docker image lasts only three months. So with high likelihood it already is expired at the time you pull and try to setup your local environment. Therefore, you should create a new demo license as follows:

Logon to your ABAP system with the user SAP*, client 000, same password as for DEVELOPER, see the documentation on Docker Hub for details.
After logging in, start the transaction SLICENSE and copy the hardware key.
Go to the minisap page and request a new trial license A4H. You can download a file A4H_Multiple.txt which contains the necessary two license keys.
Please copy the A4H_Multiple.txt file to the scripts directory of your cloned ERPL repository.
After that you can start from the root of the cloned repo sith ./scripts/start-sap.sh.

Start the SAP ABAP Trial Environment

After cloning the ERPL repository and updating the license, you can start the SAP ABAP trial environment by running the following command from the root of the cloned repository:

./scripts/start-sap.sh

This script will

Pull the Docker image sapse/abap-platform-trial:1909_SP01 from Docker Hub. This will already a long time.
Start the Docker container with the ABAP trial environment. The script sets some settings relevant for the trial environment.
- Set agree-to-sap-license to accept the SAP license agreement.
- Set skip-limits-check to make the image ignore some system limits.
- Set various sysctl and ulimit settings to make the system run smoothly.
- Mount a SAP instance profile A4H_D00_VHCALA4HCI to adapt the system to the local environment.
- Mount the created license file A4H_Multiple.txt to into the container, such that it is picked up during the startup.
- Forward the relevant ports to the host system.

Wait until the system is up and running. This can take a while, as the system needs to be initialized. On a successful start you will see:

*** All services have been started. ***
***
*** To stop and be able to safely start again use Ctrl-C
*** Or use the stop command with timeout: docker stop -t 7200 ...
***
*** Have fun! ***

After you see this, leave the terminal window open. In another terminal window you can now run the following command to open the SAP GUI:

./scripts/start-gui.sh

This will start the SAP gui and login the user DEVELOPER on the client 001.

Next step

Now that you have your local SAP test environment up and running, you can start to try out the ERPL functionality. The immediate next steps are shown in the “Connect to your SAP System” article.

You have to use the following connection settings:

SET sap_ashost = 'localhost';
SET sap_sysnr = '00';
SET sap_user = 'DEVELOPER';
SET sap_password = 'ABAPtr1909';
SET sap_client = '001';
SET sap_lang = 'EN';

You can try out if all settings are correct by sap_rfc_ping:

PRAGMA sap_rfc_ping;

which should lead to:

┌─────────┐
│   msg   │
│ varchar │
├─────────┤
│ PONG    │
└─────────┘