users@glassfish.java.net

Re: Silent Installation for glassfish application server.

From: <glassfish_at_javadesktop.org>
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:37:23 PDT

Silent installation is really inconvenient, which is a pain considering that a typical server is a headless machine without GUI:

- For V3, it's very hard not to get confused because of tons of outdated information (such as running ant -f setup.xml and the like).

- One has to launch the graphical installer for generating a [i]trivial[/i] configuration file (with 28 properties, most of them really unnecessary).

- The graphical installer checks installation requirements such as write permissions and available ports [i]on the (GUI-)machine where the answer file is generated[/i], which is completely irrelevant for the target machine. For example, if I do not have root permissions on the GUI-machine, then I won't be able to generate an answer file for an installation into /opt, even if I have root permissions on the target machine.

The whole procedure is dramatically inferior compared to common server administration tasks. For example, on Debian-based GNU/Linux systems one can install databases, web-servers, SSH-daemons etc. with single simple commands such as

apt-get install apache2

and tweak the configuration afterwards.
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