RHQ Bundle Recipe for Deploying JBoss Server

My colleague mazz wrote an excellent blog post that describes in detail the provisioning feature of RHQ. The post links to a nice Flash demo he put together to illustrates the various things he discusses in his article. Taking what I learned from his post, I put together a simple recipe to deploy a JBoss EAP server and then start the server after it has been laid down on the destination file system. Here is the recipe:


The bundle declaration itself on lines 4 - 11 is pretty straightforward. If this part is not clear, read through the docs on Ant bundles. Where things became a little less than straightforward is with the <exec> task starting on line 18. The first problem I encountered was Ant saying that it could not find run.sh. I think this is because it was looking for it on my PATH. Adding resovleexecutable="true" on line 21 took care of this problem. This tells Ant to look for the executable in the specified execution directory.

On line 22 I specify arguments to run.sh. -b 0.0.0.0 tells JBoss to bind to all available addresses. Initially I had line 22 written as:

<arg value="-b 0.0.0.0"/>

That did not get parsed correctly and resulting in JBoss throwing an exception with an error message saying that an invalid bind address was specified. Specifying the line attribute instead of the value attribute fixed the problem.

The last problem I encountered was Ant complaining that it did not have the necessary permissions to execute run.sh. It turned out that when the EAP distro was unpacked, the scripts in the bin were not executable. This is why I added the <chmodgt; call on line 17. It seems that the executable file mode bits are getting lost somewhere along the way in the deployment process. I went ahead and filed a bug for this you. You can view the ticket here.

After working through these issues, I was able to successfully deploy my JBoss server and have it start up without error. Now I can easily deploy my bundle a single machine, a cluster of RHEL servers that might serves as a QA or staging environment, or even a group heterogeneous machines that could consist of Windows, Fedora (or other Linux distros), and Mac OS X. Very cool! Provisioning is still a relatively new feature to RHQ. It add tremendous value to the platform, and fortunately I think it can add even more value. One of the things I would like to see is more support for common tasks like starting/stopping a server whether it is in the form of custom Ant tasks or something else.