This story on Techcrunch, ‘I want to run stateful containers too‘ rang home with me as it reads very similar to my own learning experience playing with containers so far, although at this point I haven’t had the opportunity to take a container based system into production, but he covers a lot of the same questions as I have so far. I imagine this journey and shift in thinking from monolithic systems to container based services is a common experience for everyone starting down this path.
Connecting to the WildFly web admin console on OpenShift
OpenShift limits the ports that are publicly accessible from your running cartridges. To connect to the WildFly web console on port 9990, you can use the port forwarding:
rhc port-forward yourappname
When it reports the list of forwarded ports, connect to localhost:9990 and logon with your admin user/password.
More info here.
OpenShift 2.0 Hot Deploy option
I’m not sure why I haven’t tried this earlier, but by default, when you git push your updates to OpenShift Online, it stops all your cartridges, builds, deploys and then restarts everything, which can take a few minutes.
OpenShift 2.0 supports a hot deploy option to minimize the amount of time that your app is down – details are in the docs here.
Local javac path issues on older OpenShift WildFly8.2 based project
I have an app that I created a few months back on OpenShit based on the WildFly 8.2 cartridge. Locally in Eclipse the project builds and compiles fine, but executing mvn directly or in Netbeans (which also builds using your mvn pom.xml), it fails with an error regarding a path to javac:
-------------------------------------------------------------
COMPILATION ERROR :
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Failure executing javac, but could not parse the error:
/bin/sh: ${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac: bad substitution
1 error
This is obviously setup for building specifically in the OpenShift environment with this property defining the path to javac:
<maven.compiler.executable>${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac</maven.compiler.executable>
There’s a few posts and discussions about this (e.g. here and I suspect this is related), but I’m guessing the version of the pom.xml I have is older and been changed recently. I created a new OpenShift WildFly based project to compare the created pom.xml, and these two properties are no longer in the pom.xml file:
<maven.compiler.executable>${env.OPENSHIFT_WILDFLY_DIR}usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_05/bin/javac</maven.compiler.executable>
<maven.compiler.fork>true</maven.compiler.fork>
Removing them fixes my local builds, and pushing the code to OpenShift still seems to build ok too.