What's new in WildFly provisioning

By Jean-François Denise | January 31, 2024

This blog post provides information on recent evolutions that have occurred at the WildFly provisioning level.

WildFly Glow tooling

This new approach to WildFly provisioning has been covered in details in this blog post and in this video published on the WildFly Youtube Channel.

We are expecting more content to be published on this topic; stay tuned!

WildFly Bootable JAR support in the WildFly Maven Plugin

From version 5.0.0.Beta2, the WildFly Maven Plugin allows you to provision a WildFly server as a Wildfly Bootable JAR. The package goal configuration has been evolved with the following options:

  • <bootable-jar>true|false</bootable-jar>: to enable generation of a Bootable JAR.

  • <bootable-jar-name>name of the jar<bootable-jar-name>: to set a specific JAR name. By default it is named server-bootable.jar

In addition, a new goal start-jar has been introduced to start the generated JAR. The shutdown goal can be used to shutdown a bootable JAR.

The WildFly JAR Maven plugin will stay, but the WildFly Maven Plugin becomes the preferred way to build a WildFly Bootable JAR and provision a WildFly server for the cloud.

WildFly Bootable JAR and cloud execution limitations

When using the WildFly JAR Maven Plugin, you have the ability to set the <cloud/> option. This option has not been migrated to the WildFly Maven Plugin. The reasons are:

  • Part of the content (the set of bash scripts that are run at server startup) packaged in the org.wildfly.cloud:wildfly-cloud-galleon-pack that is used for the cloud context is not usable when the server is packaged as a Bootable JAR.

  • In a cloud context, the kind of packaging is not really relevant. WildFly servers are not directly started. Containers are started whatever the kind of installed WildFly server.

So the JAR produced by the WildFly Maven Plugin is not expected to be used in a cloud context.

For cloud we advise provisioning a WildFly server. To do so:

  • Use WildFly Glow support (<context>cloud</context>) that will automatically retrieve the required Galleon feature-packs or

  • If not using WildFly Glow, add the org.wildfly.cloud:wildfly-cloud-galleon-pack feature-pack to the feature-packs list.

Galleon Upward compatibility

WildFly provisioning tooling heavily relies on Galleon technology.

Galleon uses the WildFly feature-packs to provision a WildFly server.

One issue that we have been facing in the past is that, when the structural content of a feature-pack changes (due to an evolution of Galleon core library or new XML schema), the provisioning tooling must be upgraded to be able to handle the new format. The failure occurs during provisioning, printing an hard to understand error message.

The root cause of this problem is that a WildFly feature-pack can require a specific version of the Galleon core library to be properly provisioned, and this version can differ from the version that the provisioning tooling (Galleon CLI or Maven Plugin, WildFly Maven Plugin, WildFly Bootable JAR Maven Plugin, WildFly Glow) directly depends on.

To solve this problem we have evolved Galleon.

WildFly Galleon feature-pack build time

When using WildFly Galleon Maven Plugin 7.0.0.Beta1, the Galleon version used to build the feature-pack is included in the feature-pack. A check is done at build time to validate that the content of the feature-pack is valid with respect to the Galleon version in use. If some content is not supported, the build fails, and an upgrade of the WildFly Galleon Maven Plugin is required.

WildFly provisioning time

We have been introducing a new Galleon tooling API that isolates the provisioning tooling from the Galleon Core version. The API implementation detects the core version required by the feature-packs and uses it.

So we should now be protected at provisioning time from incompatible changes. This API is backward compatible with older WildFly feature-packs.

The following provisioning tools have been ported to the new API:

In addition, the Galleon CLI now checks for the latest version of Galleon at startup and advises you if a new version is available.

This Galleon evolution is currently present in Galleon 6.0.0.Beta1.

WildFly 31 has not yet switched to use it, but upgrading your provisioning tooling today would prepare you for the next major WildFly release.

We plan to have Final releases prior to the WildFly 32 release.

Thank-you!

Jean-Francois Denise

WildFly is fully open. All components are open source and follow a community-focused development process.

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