Getting started with wildfly

Remarks#

Wildfly is a Java EE compliant application server. As an application server, its main purpose is to provide a set of tools that Java enterprise applications usually need, such as support for EJBs, JPA, Servlets, JAX-RS, Batch, Security, Transactions, …

Wildfly is the upstream project used by the commercial offering JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) by Red Hat.

Versions#

Version	Release Date
10.1.0.Final	2016-08-19
10.0.0.Final	2016-01-29
9.0.2.Final	2015-10-26
9.0.1.Final	2015-07-23
8.2.1.Final	2015-07-23
9.0.0.Final	2015-07-02
8.2.0.Final	2014-11-20
8.1.0.Final	2014-05-30
8.0.0.Final	2014-02-11

Installation

Installing Wildfly is just a matter of unzipping the distribution into your local machine. Wildfly can be dowloaded from its official website.

Once it is unzipped go in to bin directory of installation and run standalone.sh for Linux systems or standalone.bat for Windows systems to start your WildFly instance in default configurations. Once you see something like

13:16:12,503 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (Controller Boot Thread) WFLYSRV0025: WildFly Full 10.1.0.Final (WildFly Core 2.2.0.Final) started in 18909ms - Started 331 of 577 services (393 services are lazy, passive or on-demand)

then your brand new WildFly instance waiting to welcome you at : https://localhost:8080/

Some Linux distributions, such as Fedora, have Wildfly on its repositories and can be installed via YUM/DNF: dnf install wildfly. This, however, is not really recommended, as it tends to use slightly different versions of the libraries than the official distribution, which might cause problems that are hard to diagnose/fix.

Running it via Docker

Wildfly, part of the JBoss umbrella of projects, can also be executed via Docker. On a machine with Docker properly configured, run:

$ docker run -it jboss/wildfly

Once the image is pulled, the container starts and the following line can be seen:

09:44:49,225 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (Controller Boot Thread) WFLYSRV0025: WildFly Full 10.0.0.Final (WildFly Core 2.0.10.Final) started in 5644ms - Started 267 of 553 services (371 services are lazy, passive or on-demand)

This is an “empty” Wildfly server. On real world projects, the base image is meant to be extended so that your application in WAR/EAR packaging format, is added to it, as well as the necessary configuration changes to standalone/configuration/standalone.xml.

Starting the server

Once Wildfly is installed by unzipping the distribution, it can be started by running the standalone.sh script on the bin directory:

$ ./bin/standalone.sh 
=========================================================================

  JBoss Bootstrap Environment

  JBOSS_HOME: /mnt/storage/tools/servers/wildfly-10.0.0.Final

  JAVA: java

  JAVA_OPTS:  -server -Xms64m -Xmx512m -XX:MetaspaceSize=96M -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djboss.modules.system.pkgs=org.jboss.byteman -Djava.awt.headless=true

=========================================================================

11:54:33,781 INFO  [org.jboss.modules] (main) JBoss Modules version 1.5.1.Final
11:54:34,096 INFO  [org.jboss.msc] (main) JBoss MSC version 1.2.6.Final
11:54:34,193 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (MSC service thread 1-6) WFLYSRV0049: WildFly Full 10.0.0.Final (WildFly Core 2.0.10.Final) starting
...
...
11:54:37,653 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (Controller Boot Thread) WFLYSRV0025: WildFly Full 10.0.0.Final (WildFly Core 2.0.10.Final) started in 4357ms - Started 273 of 559 services (374 services are lazy, passive or on-demand)

With no arguments, the default configuration is used. To override the default configuration you can providing arguments on the command line.

--admin-only                        Set the server's running type to
                                    ADMIN_ONLY causing it to open
                                    administrative interfaces and accept
                                    management requests but not start other
                                    runtime services or accept end user
                                    requests.


-b <value>, -b=<value>              Set system property jboss.bind.address
                                    to the given value


-b<interface>=<value>               Set system property
                                    jboss.bind.address.<interface> to the
                                    given value


-c <config>, -c=<config>            Name of the server configuration file
                                    to use (default is "standalone.xml")
                                    (Same as --server-config)


--debug [<port>]                    Activate debug mode with an optional
                                    argument to specify the port. Only
                                    works if the launch script supports it.


-D<name>[=<value>]                  Set a system property


-h, --help                          Display this message and exit


--read-only-server-config=<config>  Name of the server configuration file
                                    to use. This differs from
                                    '--server-config' and '-c' in that the
                                    original file is never overwritten.


-P <url>, -P=<url>,                 Load system properties from the given
     --properties=<url>             url


-S<name>[=<value>]                  Set a security property


--server-config=<config>            Name of the server configuration file
                                    to use (default is "standalone.xml")
                                    (Same as -c)


-u <value>, -u=<value>              Set system property
                                    jboss.default.multicast.address to the
                                    given value


-v, -V, --version                   Print version and exit


-secmgr                             Runs the server with a security manager
                                    installed.