Preface

This document describes the functionality provided by the Glassfish plugin.

See the Deployit Reference Manual for background information on Deployit and deployment concepts.

Overview

The Glassfish plugin is a Deployit plugin that adds the capability to manage deployments and resources on Glassfish application server. The plugin has the capability of managing application artifacts, datasource and JMS resources via the Glassfish Cli, and can easily be extended to support more deployment options or management of new artifacts/resources on Glassfish.

Features

• Deploying to Domain, Standalone servers or clusters
• Deployment of application artifacts
  • Enterprise application (EAR)
  • Web application (WAR)
  • Enterprise Java beans (EJB)
  • Artifact references
• Deployment of resources
  • JDBC Connection Pools
  • JDBC Resources
  • JMS Connection Factories
  • JMS Queues
  • JMS Topics
  • Resource references
• Control tasks to
  • Create, destroy, start and stop domains and standalone servers
• Discovery of Domains, Clusters and Standalone servers

Requirements

• Deployit requirements

  • XL Deploy: version 4.0

• Infrastructural requirements

  • Glassfish versions: 3.x and 4.x
  • Linux server
  • User credentials for accessing the Host and Glassfish Cli.

Usage in Deployment Packages

The plugin works with the standard deployment package of DAR format. Please see the Packaging Manual for more details about the DAR format and the ways to compose one.

The following is a sample deployit-manifest.xml file that can be used to create a Glassfish specific deployment package. It contains declarations for an War, a connection pool, and a Jdbc resources. It also contains references to be able to target the deployables to specific containers.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<udm.DeploymentPackage version="1.0" application="MyApp">
  <deployables>

    <glassfish.War name="myWarFile" file="myWarFile/PetClinic-1.0.war">
      <scanPlaceholders>false</scanPlaceholders>
    </glassfish.War>
    <glassfish.ApplicationRefSpec name="myWarRef">
      <applicationName>myWarFile</applicationName>
    </glassfish.ApplicationRefSpec>

    <glassfish.JdbcConnectionPoolSpec name="connPool">
      <datasourceclassname>com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlConnectionPoolDataSource</datasourceclassname>
      <restype>javax.sql.DataSource</restype>
    </glassfish.JdbcConnectionPoolSpec>

    <glassfish.JdbcResourceSpec name="myJDBCResource">
      <jndiName>myJDBCResource</jndiName>
      <poolName>connPool</poolName>
    </glassfish.JdbcResourceSpec>
    <glassfish.ResourceRefSpec name="MyJDBCResourceRef">
      <resourceName>myJDBCResource</resourceName>
    </glassfish.ResourceRefSpec>

  </deployables>
</udm.DeploymentPackage>

Using the deployables and deployeds

The following table describes which deployable/container combinations are possible.

Deployable vs. Container table

The following table describes the effect a deployed has on it's container

Deployed Actions Table

Deploying to Glassfish

Note that the plugin uses the Glassfish Cli to (un)install artifacts and resources. As such, the plugin assumes that the Glassfish Domain has already been started. The plugin does not support the starting of the domain prior to a deployment.

Glassfish manages all the artifacts and resources in the domain. Therefore all artifacts and resources must be deployed directly to the domain. To target an application or resource to a specific container, you can use references. There are two types of deployables that can be used to deploy references:

• ApplicationRefSpec This deployable can be used to target applications to containers.
• ResourceRefSpec This deployable can be used to target resources to containers.

The CI name for all deployables will be used as identifier for the application or resource in glassfish. The applications and resources are referenced by name.

• A application can only be undeployed when there are no references to it. So please undeploy all references to the application as well if you want to undeploy an application. The plugin checks if there are references, and if so it will give an error.

Discovery

The plugin supports discovery of Domains, Clusters, and Standalone Servers.

The Domain can be discovered through the Host that runs the Domain. Notice that the name of the CI should match the name of the Domain, Cluster or Standalone Server. The name of the container CI is used for the --target parameter of the Glassfish Cli.

• Deployit will never discover cluster members. You are able to deploy any kind of deployable directly to the cluster, so Deployit does not need to know about the instances of a cluster.
• Deployit will always discover the default Standalone Server of the domain called server.
• Deployit will only discover infrastructure CIs. No deployed CIs will be discovered.

Extension points

The plugin is designed to be extended through Deployit's Plugin API type system and jython. The plugin wraps the Glassfish Cli with a jython runtime environment, thus allowing extenders to interact with Glassfish and Deployit from the script. Note that the jython script is executed on the Deployit Server itself and has full access to the following Deployit objects :

• deployed: The current deployed object on which the operation has been triggered.
• step: The step object that the script is being executed from. Exposes an overthere remote connection for file manipulation and a method to execute Glassfish Cli commands.
• container: The container object to which the deployed is targeted to.
• delta: The delta specification that lead to the script being executed.
• deployedApplication: The entire deployed application.

The plugin associates Create, Modify, Destroy, Noop and Inspect operations received from Deployit with jython scripts that need to be executed for the specific operation to be performed.

There also exists an advanced method to extend the plugin, but the implementation of this form of extension needs to be written in the Java programming language and consists of writing so-called Deployed contributors, PlanPreProcessors and Contributors.

Please refer to the Customization Manual for a detailed explanation of the type system and advanced methods of customization of plugins. Also refer to the Overthere documentation for working with remote files.

Adding Additional Properties

Glassfish artifacts and resources support the concept of Additional Properties. These properties are normally specified by using the --properties argument of Glassfish Cli commands. Deployit can be extended very easily to add one or more Additional Properties. You can add them by extending a type synthetically. You need to add the property into the category "Additional Properties".

For example:

<type-modification type="glassfish.WarModule">
    <property name="keepSessions" kind="boolean" category="Additional Properties" default="true"/>
</type-modification>

This will result in adding the Additional Property keepSessions to be available on the CI, with a default value of true. This will result in deploying the application with the Glassfish Cli argument --properties keepSessions=true.

Extending the plugin with custom control task

The plugin has the capability to add control tasks to CliManagedDeployed or CliManagedContainer. The control task can be specified as a jython script that will be executed on the Deployit Server. The jython script will execute asadmin commands on the remote host.

Creating a jython based control task to list jdbc drivers in a StandaloneServer

Synthetic.xml snippet

<type-modification type="glassfish.Domain">
  <method name="listClusters" label="List clusters" delegate="asadmin" script="list-clusters.py" >
</type-modification>

list-clusters.py snippet

logOutput("Listing clusters")
result = executeCmd('list-clusters')
logOutput(result.output)
logOutput("Done.")

The script will execute the list-clusters command using asadmin on the remote host, and print the result.

Release Notes

Glassfish plugin 4.0.0

Bug fixes

• [DEPL-5398] - Glassfish plugin script error on undeployment