Summary

The deployer is one of the most frequently used command-line tools for Geronimo. The deployer is used to deploy modules to a Geronimo server. A deployment plan can be optionally used to customize the deployment beyond the available options in a standard J2EE deployment descriptor.

The deployer \can work while a Geronimo server instance is running, using the online deployer on the server side. Or, the deployer can work in an offline mode locally without a Geronimo server running.

The deployer is actually a JSR-88-compliant deployment client. This means that it can use drivers from other JSR-88-complaint servers and deploy to those servers.

Geronimo’s JSR-88 support enables it to be used with other deployment clients. A deployment client can be built into an IDE (allowing that IDE to deploy to Geronimo).

The Maven deployment plug-in for Geronimo can be used within Maven scripts to automate common administration tasks.

When deployment does not work quite the way you expected, you can turn up the verbosity of the deployer’s logging via the --verbose general option. Often, however, there may be a need to see if a particular software component belonging to a module is actually loaded and running - or has failed. Chapter 7 reveals how you may obtain this finer granularity of information from a running Geronimo server.