Redeploying to a remote glassfish with cargo (previous blog post follow up) - Solving the "application already registered error"

Sometimes right after you spent a whole day working on something (and blogging about it) you realize that there's actually an easier and faster way to accomplish the something.. d'oh (thank you very much brain

In my previous post here I was talking about an issue that I was having while trying to redeploy different versions of my application on the same glassfish context

To sum things up, the first time I deployed the application everything will work as expected but subsequent deployments will throw an error telling me that an application already exists for that context root (see message below) :

 Caused by: org.codehaus.cargo.util.CargoException: Deployment has failed: Action failed Deploying application to target server failed; Error occurred during deployment: Application with name myapp-1.4.8 is already registered. Either specify that redeployment must be forced, or redeploy the application. Or if this is a new deployment, pick a different name. Please see server.log for more details.

As it turns out you can use the cargo maven plugin to redeploy your application to your glassfish server as long as you still use the glassfish application versioning system described in my previous post, you can find more info on the versionning system here but basically glassfish will handle multiple versions of your application for a given context but having only 1 active at a given moment

You can exploit the versioning system by either using the naming convention {app-name}:{appVersion}.war or specifying the version in the glassfish deployment descriptor /WEB-INF/glassfish-web.xml

For some mysterious reason the I couldn't get the deployment working with the naming convention approach so I will be showing how to accomplish the remote redeployments using the deployment descriptor :

1.- Create deployment description (if necessary) and add the application version

    /myapp
    ${project.version}

2.- Configure your pom.xml

Once your deployment descriptor is configured you need to configure your pom.xml file to :

1. Configure the maven war plugin to filter your deployment descriptor
2. Configure your cargo plugin with the appropriate options corresponding to your environment

   4.0.0
   
      spring-mongodb:${project.version}
      
         ...
         
            org.apache.maven.plugins
            maven-war-plugin
            2.1.1
            
               false
               true
               
                  
                     ${basedir}/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF
                     true
                     WEB-INF
                     
                        **/glassfish-web.xml
                     
                  
               
            
         
         
            org.codehaus.cargo
            cargo-maven2-plugin
            1.1.2
            
               
                  glassfish3x
                  remote
               
               
                  runtime
                  
                     my-remote-glassfish.com
                     admin
                     mypass
                  
               
            
            
               
                  org.glassfish.deployment
                  deployment-client
                  3.1.1
               
            
         
         ...
      
   

3.- (Re)Deploy your application

Once you have your configuration files "configured" go to your command line (or configure a run goal in your favorite IDE) and run the following maven command (with your server started) :

   mvn clean package cargo:redeploy

If everything works as expected you should get the following output for your maven command

[INFO] --- cargo-maven2-plugin:1.1.2:redeploy (default-cli) @ spring-mongodb ---
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 9.208s
[INFO] Finished at: Thu Jul 04 20:35:06 CEST 2013
[INFO] Final Memory: 18M/221M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Process finished with exit code 0

Note: Please be aware that every-time that you redeploy an app glassfish will enable the latest one (one enabled application per context) so if you don't want to keep older versions don't forget to periodically remove them with the asadmin command