[FIXED] How to continously deploy a feature to karaf?

Issue

I want to continously deploy a feature to ServiceMix 6.0, which is based on Karaf 3.0.4.

I first tried this using the karaf console. However there are some problems. It is for a standard karaf installation not possible to determine on the karaf console if a feature is already installed (see my other question on this). The other problem with the karaf console is that it doesn't support exit codes. So it is not possible to determine reliably if a feature installation was successfully finished.

I then installed hawtio and tried to use the exposed JMX beans via jolokia/REST that is bundled with hawtio. The problem here is that karaf 3.0.x is unable to update a feature. Therefore features must be uninstalled first. However the FeatureService only offers the possibility to uninstall an explicitly specified feature. But when a previous version of the feature was installed, subfeatures were installed with it. They also need an upgrade and therefore be uninstalled first. So I would need a way to iterate over the subfeatures of a feature, which I do not have.

So how can continous deployment of features to karaf 3.0.x be done?

Solution

The first try we have implemented is a bash script. The biggest problem is uninstalling the old version. Therefore we have set up a convention for the names of the feature and it's subfeatures. So we can use the following to find already installed features:

features=$(echo "feature:list" | ssh -p $smx_ssh_port $smx_user@$smx_host | grep -h "<feature-name-convention-regex>.*|.*x.*|" | cut -f1 -d" " | tr '\n' ' ')

This can then be passed to feature:uninstall and can also be used for detecting if features were installed after the call to feature:repo-add -i.

The remaining problem is that we are unable to reference 3rd-party subfeatures because they won't be uninstalled when an updated version needs to be installed and we can't be sure if all of the subfeatures have been successfully installed.

Answered By - SpaceTrucker

Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (PHPFixing Admin)