Tag Archives: maven

Continuous delivery using Maven / Shell

Posted on by
2

Continuous delivery


After Continuous Integration, this is the word we see on the web these days. Its meaning is really simple, it consists in reducing steps in application deployment. In order to do so a set of tools actually exists, you can use the same PaaS images (thanks to the newcomer Micro Cloud Foundry by VMWare or use a special amazon ec2 instance) to have a development environment similar to production one. And you can use Chef to manage and automate your configuration. While these alternatives are really interesting, I think they are way too powerful and difficult to setup in simple cases.
I will explain my “simple” solution based on maven, shell scripts and hostname detection.

Example release archive

An example is better than a thousand words, you will find an example of my solution in a github repository Easy Release Archive. It is a maven project building a zip artifact containing everything to be deployed, and an example script to setup the Glassfish server.

What is inside ?

To understand how it works, the best thing is to look what’s inside.

  • an assembly.xml file describing the files to include and their output name and location.
  • a few scripts in /src/main/resources
    • sanityCheck.sh : helper script sourcing the correct variables depending on the hostname of the machine and ensuring variables are correctly setup
    • setupGlassfish.sh : a sample script used to setup a Glassfish server with its required datasources and other parameters
    • a global folder containing global configuration files
    • a per hostname folder (in my case samva-mbp) containing a shell/envSetup.sh shell script to setup necessary variables and a config folder for special environment configuration files.
  • the pom.xml file describing artifact versions to use in the assembly and the lifecycle to use.

A simple mvn package will build the zip archive with everything described in the assembly.xml file. You will just have to unzip and run the script(s) corresponding to the application deployment for it to be done. You can add this command line to your build server and you will have a simple but powerful continuous delivery system !

ejb-client package + JRebel + Glassfish

Posted on by
1

JRebel ?

I use JRebel to speed up my development. It is a really impressive tool allowing to develop full blended Java EE application as you would develop in PHP. No redeploy, at the cost of a little slow-down in development mode. The tool does what it says, and it’s worth the price ! The JRebel plugin for maven does the job very well by generating the rebel.xml file that does the magic.

What’s the deal ?

Although JRebel is an awesome tool, there is some magic within, and, in special corner cases it might not work as expected. In my case I have a quite typical web application split in multiple parts:

  • a web application (war)
  • an ejb module (jar)
  • other modules not involved in my problem

The web application includes, in its WEB-INF/lib folder, the ejb-client artifact of my ejb module. To make it clear, ejb-client artifact is typically the jar containing the interfaces to be used by the client module(s).

The problem I had was that JRebel magic was reloading too much things : in fact, it reloaded classes even if they were not in the ejb-client. My application container (Glassfish 3.x) was not very keen on this thing. I opened a thread on ZeroTurnAround’s forum and the answer I got is that I have to find a way to ignore files in my ejb-client module. By digging in maven-ejb-plugin, I didn’t find anything to rename a file in the ejb-client module, and I didn’t find a parameter to pass to JRebel to specify which filenames can contain its configuration.
Continue reading →

Getting source revision for a deployed app using Maven and a Servlet

Posted on by
Reply

With our modern version control systems, we could assume we know for every single release we make the exact source code revision that corresponds. But, in the hurry of a bug found by your dear clients (or your product owner),  you can’t find the corresponding tag in your VCS, it will make the whole patch process really difficult. You will have to find the exact revision, extract it and debug to patch (or backport an existing patch).

I will explain a little trick to make the find the revision thing a lot easier (I am assuming you’re using maven to build your projects) : maven-buildnumber-plugin

Continue reading →