Hello all,
Working with different hosting companies, we used to have issues when
deploying OFBiz concerning technical configuration of the different
environments.
We are writing this mail to get feedback from the community and
eventually propose to improve OFBiz on this matter.
For a customer, we are working with 4 instances of a release 13.07
OFBiz, and are currently using a set of patches (with addonmanager...)
to manage environment specific configurations.
During each production deployment, the hosting company receive from our
jenkins a precompiled archive containing OFBiz codebase, and then apply
the set of patches to configure it to the environment needs, recompile
and relaunch...
This way of doing can cause issue when patch could not apply, after a
codebase modification (pretty rare but it happens).
We are not satisfied with this way of doing, we are currently thinking
about using environment variables to configure technical environment
properties (those are on the hosting company responsibility), and to
keep functional specifics into the code base.
If you have some experience or advice in this matter, you are welcome.
For our case, we currently have enhanced OFBiz to be able to get
environment variable from the operating system within property file and
some other configuration files (with default value if not set).
Examples :
*In Property file :
password=${env:ONE_CONF:ofbiz} -> environment variable ONE_CONF or ofbiz
if unset
other_config=${env:OTHER_CONF:${partyId}} -> environment variable
OTHER_CONF or ${partyId} if unset
*In entityengine.xml :
jdbc-uri="${env:DB_POSTGRES_URI:jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1/ofbiz?autoReconnect=true}"
jdbc-username="${env:DB_POSTGRES_USER:ofbiz}"
jdbc-password="${env:DB_POSTGRES_PWD:ofbiz}"/>
That allow us to keep functional parameters stored within git branches.
Our jenkins now is able to build our 4 configured and compiled instances
and deliver it to the hosting company, that just have to set/check
environment variable (database access, activeMQ, log location, instance
id, etc.) before starting OFBiz app. Now we cannot have configuration
failure during deployment.
We will be glad to contribute it, if it's the good way to go !
Best Regards !
Gil Portenseigne
