Thursday, November 23, 2017

Deploy a Custom WebSphere Liberty Runtime with the MicroProfile 1.2 Feature in IBM Cloud

WebSphere Liberty is a fast, dynamic, and easy-to-use Java application server, built on the open source Open Liberty project. Ideal for developers but also ready for production, on-premise or in the cloud.

IBM Bluemix (is now IBM Cloud) is the latest cloud offering from IBM. It enables organizations and developers to quickly and easily create, deploy, and manage applications on the cloud. Bluemix is an implementation of IBM's Open Cloud Architecture based on Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS). IBM Cloud Foundry includes runtimes for Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift and Go; Cloud Foundry community build packs are also available.

Although IBM Cloud has already provided a runtime engine for WebSphere Liberty, sometimes this isn't enough and developers may need their own version of the platform, i.e. a lightweight version based on Liberty Kernel, or an old version to ensure backward compatibility, or the version of WebSphere Liberty armed with a set of features specific for the developed application.

The blog post provides a demonstration of how to deploy your own installation of WebSphere Liberty to IBM Cloud as a usual Java application. The deployed installation is armed with the latest version of MicroProfile, an open forum to collaborate on Enterprise Java Microservices, issued on October 3, 2017.

Eclipse MicroProfile 1.2 is built on the 1.1 version and updates the config API and adds the health check, fault tolerance, metrics, and JWT propagation APIs. As stated on the official page of the project, the goal of MicroProfile is to iterate and innovate in short cycles, get community approval, release, and repeat. Eventually, the output of this project could be submitted to the JCP for possible future inclusion in a Java JSR (or some other standards body). The WebSphere Liberty application server implements Microprofile 1.2, just the corresponding feature -
microprofile-1.2 - must be included in the server.xml configuration file.


The application structure


The demo application is divided into two parts:

  1. liberty-microprofile-app - a web-application, which leverages MicroProfile 1.2. The application also contains a Java servlet
    that puts into the output stream the information about on which JVM he works. This information will be important when we try to publish the application on different JVMs within the cloud platform.

  2. liberty-microprofile-wlp - a Maven project with the liberty-assembly Maven packaging type that is used to create a packaged WebSphere Liberty server. The project is critically dependent on liberty-maven-plugin and leverages the plugin to provide the following actions:
    • install the WebSphere Liberty runtime
    • create an application server
    • install the microprofile-1.2 feature to the WebSphere Liberty runtime
    • copy applications specified as Maven compile dependencies to WebSphere Liberty server's apps directory
    • package the WebSphere Liberty runtime

    The liberty-maven-plugin configuration:



    The configFile and serverName parameters let the plugin know the server's name and where the server's configuration is. The looseApplication and installAppPackages say to the plugin to install the applications described in the dependencies section into the server's apps directory. Note: the location attribute of the application/webApplication elements inside the server.xml configuration file, if the elements present there, must match the artifact's name (without the version number since the stripVersion plugin parameter is set to true). Otherwise the additional application configuration file will be created and the application configuration including the context-root will be lost.

    Because no features are specified within the features element of the plugin's configuration, all missing features declared in the server.xml file will be installed.

    IBM Cloud translates requests to the application on port 8080, so the httpEndpoint configuration element of the server must up the server on host 0.0.0.0 and port 8080. The server's full configuration can be found bellow:



Build the application


To build the application do:

# mvn clean package

Deploy the application in IBM Cloud


By default IBM Cloud uses the Java Buildpack Version: v3.19 buildpack to make a deployment of the application in the cloud. Since there are a number of executable files in the wlp/bin inside the WebSphere Liberty server archive, the buildpack isn't able to find the right one (wlp/bin/server). The following command must be specified for the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface tool (as a parameter or in the manifest.yml file): ./wlp/bin/server run apiServer.

Note: server run is essential! If the server start is specified, the cloud infrastructure will seem the application has just been crashed after the start command exit. Once the command is specified, the path to the java command also must be set for the application.

The server command reads the path from the JAVA_HOME environment variable. If the Java Buildpack is in use, the following path to an OpenJDK installation must be assigned: /home/vcap/app/.java-buildpack/open_jdk_jre. If the Liberty Buildpack Version: v3.13 is taken into account, the following path to an IBM JVM installation must be in use: /home/vcap/app/.java/jre. If any out-of-memory problems are faced, the JVM_ARGS environment variable should be set.

The above parameters are collected into the manifest.yml file. To deploy the application in the cloud just do:

# cf push

When the command is completed, the application will be available by the configured URL:


If you prefer OpenJDK to IBM JVM, please use the following command:

# cf push -f ./manifest-oracle.yml

When the command is completed, the application will be available by the configured URL:


The sources of the demo application can be found on GitHub.

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