Quick guide for installation Glassfish on Solaris

Preamble

One of the tasks of UNIX/Linux administration is the installation of software. In this article we will discuss the installation of Glassfish - a Java application server from Oracle on the Solaris platform:-

Prerequisites

For the installation we will need Solaris OS installed and a JDK . For an example manual on how to install Solaris, see. In this example we will use JDBC connection to an Oracle database. For the Oracle client we could choose Instant Client or the full Installation, because, in our case, we will only need ojdbc14.jar to be in the Glassfish /lib directory. But I strictly recommend installing the full Oracle client, (Administrator), because there are a lot of helpful utilities such as sqlplus, tnsping which can help resolve oracle (and other) connectivity problems there. Also recommended is to install its own version of JDK (as described in the remarks here:  This will help you have a nonchangeable environment to run the application server. However it will add some system administration overhead. But it will increase the reliability of our environment.

Installation process

1. Install Oracle client
   (below we assume the installation base is in /opt/oracle and the installation of the client is in the directory: /opt/oracle/product/10.2.0/client_1 and the version of Oracle client is 10.2)
2. Create a user to run our application server:
   useradd -d /opt/Glassfish -k /etc/skel -m Glassfish
   Of course it is possible to run Glassfish as root, but for security reasons, the separation of duties and privileges is strictly recommended to run software under its own user. On the above command ignore the error, related to the length of the user name.
3. Download and extract JDK for example in /etc/Glassfish/java
4. Download Glassfish software and put the archive in /opt
   Do not forget to change ownership of the file and to remove it after installation
5. Set the environment variables for Glassfish user:
   JAVA_HOME=/opt/Glassfish/java
   ORACLE_BASE=/opt/oracle
   ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_BASE}/product/10.2.0/client_1
   ORACLE_SID=ORCL
   LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib:/lib:/usr/lib
   CLASSPATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/jre:${ORACLE_HOME}/jlib:${ORACLE_HOME}/rdbms/jlib
   ANT_HOME=/opt/Glassfish/lib/ant
   PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${ANT_HOME}/bin:$PATH
   export JAVA_HOME ORACLE_BASE ORACLE_HOME LD_LIBRARY_PATH CLASSPATH ANT_HOME PATH
   
6. switch to Glassfish user
7. run installation of Glassfish
   java -Xmx256m -jar Glassfish-installer-v2-b58g.jar
   (the name of Glassfish installation file is just an example, your may vary)
8. go to Glassfish home directory
9. add executable mode to ant
   chmod -R +x lib/ant/bin
10. run ant to accomplish configuration of Glassfish
    lib/ant/bin/ant -f setup.xml
    (if server will be in cluster instead of setup.xml use setup-cluster.xml)
11. Voila! You have installed the Glassfish Java application server