[wildfly-dev] Customizing a provisioned server

[Stuart Douglas]

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.

Does this all sound reasonable?

Stuart