I created an installer with IzPack. This page documents the procedure.

Install Overview

• The installer starts with a Geronimo installation with no actual configurations, but it has the deployment plans
• It prompts the user for key configuration values (default username/password, network ports, listen address, etc.), and updates the deployment plans accordingly
• It installs the empty Geronimo, and then deploys the updated deployment plans
• Voila! A customized Geronimo install

Preparation

• Get a CVS HEAD version of IzPack (or v3.8.0+ once it's released) – for older versions you need to manually patch in support for the so-called "!ExecuteForPacks".
  • cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.izpack.berlios.de:/cvsroot/izpack login
  • Press "Enter" for password
  • cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.izpack.berlios.de:/cvsroot/izpack co izpack-src
  • cd izpack-src/src
  • ant dist
  • See ../_dist (particularly ../_dist/bin/compile)
  • add izpack-src/_dist/bin to your PATH
• Get a current source tree of Geronimo
  • Build it, at least as far as the assembly module
• The IzPack installer config files and all necessary Geronimo files are copied into the assembly/target/installer directory during the assembly build, with certain variable substitution performed. This includes modified plans in installer/plan-src (and WARs in installer/wars). These plans have substitution variables for the following items:
  • client-system-plan.xml – naming host (localhost) and port (1099) [{{PlanServerHostname}} and {{PlanNamingPort}}]
  • interop-server-plan.xml – IIOP listen host (localhost) and port (9000), ORB port (2001), naming host name (localhost), naming port (1050), allowed client addresses (127.0.0.1) [{{PlanServerHostname}}, {{PlanIIOPPort}}, {{PlanORBPort}}, {{PlanServerHostname}}, {{PlanCOSNamingPort}}, {{PlanClientAddresses}}]
  • j2ee-server-plan.xml – port for Jetty HTTP (8080) and HTTPS (8443), EJB server port (4201), EJB server host name (localhost), allowed EJB client addresses (127.0.0.1), JMX remoting host name (localhost) [{{PlanJettyHTTPPort}}, {{PlanJettyHTTPSPort}}, {{PlanOpenEJBPort}}, {{PlanServerHostname}}, {{PlanClientAddresses}}, {{PlanServerHostname}}]
  • j2ee-server-tomcat-plan.xml – host (localhost), ports for HTTP (8090), HTTPS (8443), and AJP (8009) [{{PlanServerHostname}}, {{PlanTomcatHTTPPort}}, {{PlanTomcatHTTPSPort}}, {{PlanTomcatAJPPort}}]
  • system-activemq-plan.xml – port for ActiveMQ (61616), host name for ActiveMQ (localhost) [{{PlanActiveMQPort}},{{PlanServerHostname}}]
  • system-database-plan.xml – hostname (localhost) and port for Derby network access (1527) [{{PlanServerHostname}}, {{PlanDerbyPort}}]
  • system-jms-plan.xml – hostname, port for ActiveMQ (localhost:61616) [{{PlanServerHostname}},{{PlanActiveMQPort}}]
  • system-plan.xml – port for RMIRegistry (1099), server host name (localhost) [{{PlanServerHostname}} and {{PlanNamingPort}}]
• Customize the installer configuration if desired
  • You may want to update maven.xml to have the correct version number for the most recent release notes file (Jelly variable ReleaseNotesVersion). There's probably a better place to store this.
  • The installer configuration is not really optimal
    • The same default configurations are always marked to be started (fortunately I think all of them are in required packages)
    • It's not clear what would happen in the event of a port collision since the installer attempts to run the server in order to install to it
    • It individually deploys each of the up to 17 possible configurations (using the slow one-off deployer), which takes a pretty long time – compare to the assembly module which starts the server after 3 or 4 steps, does everything else against the running server, then shuts it down.

Building

• Use the !IzPack compile tool to build the installer: compile geronimo-izpack.xml -o geronimo-installer.jar from the assembly/target/installer directory.
  • This step can be run by a script, so long as the !IzPack bin directory is added to the PATH – the Geronimo build assembles all the source material that is needed to build the installer