I was recently tasked with installing JBoss 4.2 on Centos/RHEL 5. I found the experience remarkably difficult, so I figured I should share it for my own future reference, and hopefully to also save the sanity of whatever other poor souls are tasked with the same project.
- Start off with RHEL 5 or Centos 5
- Install jpackage50.repo into /etc/yum.repos.d/ (instructions for how to make this file can be found at jpackage.org)
- run “yum update”
- run “yum install jbossas”
- If you see this message: ” –> Missing Dependency: /usr/bin/rebuild-security-providers” then download jpackage-utils-compat-el5-0.0.1-1.noarch and install it by using rpm -i jpackage-utils-compat-el5-0.0.1-1.noarch.rpm , then run “yum install jbossas” again. See this bug at Red Hat for details, and http://www.zarb.org/pipermail/jpackage-discuss/2008-July/012751.html for how the rpm was built.
- run “/sbin/chkconfig jbossas on” to start JBoss automatically at startup
- Until this bug is resolved , run this command: “ln -s /usr/share/java/eclipse-ecj.jar /usr/share/java/ecj.jar”
- If you want JBoss to listen to requests from systems other than localhost, edit /etc/jbossas/jbossas.conf. Create a new line that reads “JBOSS_IP=0.0.0.0”.
- put your .ear’s, .war’s, ejb .jar’s, *-ds.xml’s into /var/lib/jbossas/server/default/deploy
- Start JBoss by running “/etc/init.d/jbossas start”
JVM args can be found in /etc/jbossas/run.conf.
Note that if your web application (war, ear, whatever) depends on JNDI, you need to edit /var/lib/jbossas/server/default/deploy/jboss-web.deployer/META-INF/jboss-service.xml and a line for each JNDI data source like this: “<depends>jboss.jca:service=DataSourceBinding,name=jdbc/whatever</depends>”. This little detail cost me quite a few hours to figure out… an explanation as to why this is necessary can be found at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Known+Issues+for+JBoss. Basically, JBoss will start applications before JNDI data sources unless told otherwise, so your application will error out on startup with an exception like this: “Caused by: javax.naming.NamingException: Could not dereference object [Root exception is javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: jdbc not bound]”.
Some may argue that I should have simply downloaded the tar from jboss.org and manually installed JBoss without a package manager. However, the package manager offers a lot of advantages, such as dependency resolution/management, automatic updates for security and/or new features, clean and easy uninstall, and a lot more. When given the choice, I always choose to use a package manager, and will even create packages if ones are not available, and I report package bugs so others, and my future self,will have a better experience.
A lot of the pain in installing JBoss is due to bugs in the packaging. I hope that jpackage.org / Red Hat solves these problems soon – I wouldn’t really want anyone to have to live through the trouble I went through to figure all this out again.
