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Arun Gupta is a technology enthusiast, a passionate runner, and a community guy who works for Sun Microsystems.

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Friday June 20, 2008

TOTD #34: Using Felix Shell with GlassFish

TOTD #33 explains how to create a GlassFish v3 distribution that uses Apache Felix (default) as the OSGi R4 Service Platform runtime. This blog explains how to use Felix Shell TUI with that bundle to issue commands to the OSGi framework and obtain information from it.

To enable Felix Shell with GlassFish v3, add the lines ...

${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/felix/bundle/org.apache.felix.shell.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/felix/bundle/org.apache.felix.shell.tui.jar

to "felix.auto.start.1" property in "felix/conf/config.properties" file of the expanded bundle. The updated property looks like:

felix.auto.start.1= \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/modules/tiger-types-osgi-0.3.2.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/modules/auto-depends-0.3.2.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/modules/config-0.3.2.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/modules/hk2-core-0.3.2.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/modules/osgi-adapter-0.3.2.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/felix/bundle/org.apache.felix.shell.jar \
${com.sun.aas.installRootURI}/felix/bundle/org.apache.felix.shell.tui.jar

with the changes highlighted in bold.

The shell works only if GlassFish is started using "java -jar modules/glassfish-10.0-SNAPSHOT.jar" command.

The shell is available when the following prompt is shown:

INFO: Glassfish v3 started in 1624 ms
Jun 16, 2008 7:10:37 PM
INFO: ->
Jun 16, 2008 7:10:37 PM com.sun.enterprise.glassfish.bootstrap.ASMainFelix launchOSGiFW
INFO: Framework successfully started

You can type "help" in the shell to see the complete list of commands that are available:

help
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: bundlelevel <level> <id> ... | <id> - set or get bundle start level.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: cd [<base-URL>]                     - change or display base URL.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: headers [<id> ...]                  - display bundle header properties.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: help                                - display impl commands.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: install <URL> [<URL> ...]           - install bundle(s).
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: packages [<id> ...]                 - list exported packages.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: ps [-l | -s | -u]                   - list installed bundles.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: refresh [<id> ...]                  - refresh packages.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: resolve [<id> ...]                  - attempt to resolve the specified bundles.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: services [-u] [-a] [<id> ...]       - list registered or used services.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: shutdown                            - shutdown framework.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: start <id> [<id> <URL> ...]         - start bundle(s).
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: startlevel [<level>]                - get or set framework start level.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: stop <id> [<id> ...]                - stop bundle(s).
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: uninstall <id> [<id> ...]           - uninstall bundle(s).
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: update <id> [<URL>]                 - update bundle.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: version                             - display version of framework.
Jun 16, 2008 7:11:12 PM
INFO: ->

This shows the list of available commands along with a brief description. For example "ps" shows the list of installed bundles as shown below:

ps
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: START LEVEL 1
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO:    ID   State         Level Name
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: [   0] [Active     ] [    0] System Bundle (1.0.4)
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: [   1] [Active     ] [    1] org.jvnet.tiger-types repackaged as module (0.3.2)
. . .
INFO: [ 137] [Installed ] [    1] WebTier Security Integration (10.0.0.SNAPSHOT)
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: [ 138] [Installed ] [    1] Web module command line interface (10.0.0.SNAPSHOT)
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: [ 139] [Installed ] [    1] Admin GUI Web Container Plugin (10.0.0.SNAPSHOT)
Jun 16, 2008 7:13:57 PM
INFO: ->

More details about the commands and options are available @ Felix Usage Docs.

The commands are described in "felix/conf/config.properties" (around line 38).

Please leave suggestions on other TOTD (Tip Of The Day) that you'd like to see. A complete archive is available here.

Technorati: totd glassfish v3 felix osgi

Posted by Arun Gupta in General | Comments[5]

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Comments:

[Trackback] GlassFish v3 is a modular (OSGi compliant), embeddable (runs in-VM) and extensible (supports non-Java apps) Application Server. The extensible part is demonstrated by deployment of Rails and Grails applications. An example of embeddability is an in-VM...

Posted by Arun Gupta's Blog on June 26, 2008 at 06:17 AM PDT #

Hi, Arun

I tried to run felix console with glassfish tech. preview 2, but it does not pick it up.

Posted by Alexander on July 23, 2008 at 07:14 AM PDT #

Alexander, Felix is not the default shell for TP2. I started TP2 as:

java -DGlassFish_Platform=Felix -jar modules/glassfish-10.0-tp-2-SNAPSHOT.jar

after enabling Felix shell and then the prompt came fine.

Posted by Arun Gupta on July 28, 2008 at 11:10 AM PDT #

Sorry, I can't get this to work - I can't find felix/conf anywhere in the GFv3 source distribution. And I don't know what you mean by an "expanded bundle". Any help you can give would be most appreciated.

Posted by David Van Couvering on August 10, 2008 at 09:23 AM PDT #

David,

These instructions work with a binary bundle. http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/totd_33_building_glassfish_v3 explains how to create such a bundle using GlassFish v3 workspace. And then you can extract distributions/glassfish/target/glassfish-10.0-SNAPSHOT.zip or distributions/web/target/web.zip. Both of these bundles contain felix/conf directory.

Posted by Arun Gupta on August 10, 2008 at 03:11 PM PDT #