On Sep 3, 2014, at 11:16 PM, Stuart Douglas <sdouglas(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi everyone,
Work on the provisioning tool is now well underway, so I would like to
revisit something I mentioned in my original email, which is allowing
the provisioning tool to customize a provisioned server.
I think there are a few options here, some more palatable than others.
In no particular order:
1) Customize the XML directly
Using this approach we would just directly customize the XML
configuration files. This would basically require the use of XSLT
(yuck), or require us to basically invent our own version of XSLT (even
more yuck). Even though this approach will work, and will be fairly easy
to implement, I think it would really suck from an end-user point of
view, and I think we should discount it.
2) Allow the user to provide CLI commands to customise the server
This is by far my favorite approach. The provisioning file would just
contain a list of CLI commands, and would execute them in order. I think
this is by far the most intuitive, and the CLI is well documented.
3) Allow the user to provide DMR operations to customize the server
Similar to 2, but allow the user to provide DMR or JSON operations to
customize the server. I think this is not nearly as nice as 2, as users
are much more likely to be familiar with the CLI rather than DMR.
I think 2 is by far the best approach, however it does open up the
question of how and when to execute the operations. I think the easiest
way to do this would be to just start the server in admin only mode on a
custom port (so it will not interfere with any existing running Wildfly
instances), and just execute the CLI commands in admin only mode.
My big concern is how we deal with overlapping configuration. If we figure that out
something like 2 or 3 aren’t that much different to me. 2 is just an abbreviated syntax
for the operation element.
Note that we have a feature request for “offline CLI” which amounts to really an embedded
management mode with no ports.
--
Jason T. Greene
WildFly Lead / JBoss EAP Platform Architect
JBoss, a division of Red Hat