[wildfly-dev] Customizing a provisioned server

[Jason Greene]

On Sep 3, 2014, at 11:16 PM, Stuart Douglas <sdouglas at 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