One deploy dir per user

[pplupo]

Hi everyone.
I'm from a large brazilian university and I have been presented the following problem from the laboratory administrators of a computer science department who are seeking to provide JBoss AS for the students.

ATM, each user has a login and a home directory. At this home dir, there is a public_html where files can be placed to be served by Apache HTTPD (for those who know it, that is made with mod_userdir /home//public_html makes it available at /~).

In order to provide JBoss AS, it would be nice if one could set it up like that. Indicate a directory in user's profile which would be scanned for deployment and make the application available at some url also configurable.

So, to be short: I want one instance of JBoss AS scanning multiple dirs for applications to be made available at different urls, depending on the dir, with each dir related to a particular user.

Can anyone say how it can be done with AS5?

Thank you, in advance.

[peterj]

Which version of JBoss AS5? For 5.1.0, you can edit the applicationURIs property for the BootstrapProfileFactory bean in the server/xxx/conf/bootstrap/profile.xml file, adding in extra directories:

<property name="applicationURIs">
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>/path/to/other/dir</value>
 </list>
</property>

[pplupo]

That's nice, it's almost that. Now, how can I make each dir to map to a different URL?
Like


${jboss.server.home.url}deploy
/path/to/studentA


${jboss.server.home.url}deploy
/path/to/studentB


so the first element is made available at http://domain/studentA and the second at http://domain/studentB?

[pplupo]

I'm sorry, I forgot to tag like code.

The "${jboss.server.home.url}deploy
/path/to/studentA
${jboss.server.home.url}deploy
/path/to/studentB"

should be:

<property name="applicationURIs">
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>/path/to/studentA</value>
 </list>
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>/path/to/studentB</value>
 </list>
</property>

[peterj]

Here's one way - give each directory a .war extension:

<property name="applicationURIs">
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>/path/to/studentA.war</value>
 </list>
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>/path/to/studentB.war</value>
 </list>
</property>

[pplupo]

But then will they be able to deploy compressed wars or just exploded?

In fact, will they be able to deploy ears?

[peterj]

No, that of course just provides access to HTML and similar pages.

For deploying WAR, EAR and EJB-JARs you would have to go without the .war extension on the directory. (Actually, thinking about it some more, that won't work anyway, though it woulds work in AS 4.x.)

I don't know of any way of providing a separate context for each student.

[pplupo]

Thank you, Peter, for trying. I still hope someone will answer this.

[pplupo]

The session "User Web Applications" at "http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/host.html" is exactly what I'm looking for at JBoss.

[pplupo]

On Tomcat there is a config file where one can declare:

<Host name="localhost" ...>

<Listener className="org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig"
directoryName="public_html"
homeBase=c:\Homes"
userClass="org.apache.catalina.startup.HomesUserDatabase"/>


where "c:\homes" is where users' home folders are and "public_html" is the folder to be scanned for WAR files.

Then if there is a user called "pplupo", his contents will be found at C:\homes\pplupo\public_html and his applications will be available at http://host:port/~pplupo automatically.

I just want to do something similar with JBoss. Even if it is not that easy, if I have to change multiple files, multiple tags, properties or anything else, but I need to set up an environment like that.

Can anyone help me?