Getting Started with Traditional WebSphere Deployment using IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD)

Author: Randy Langehennig

Date: 1/3/2022, v1.0

Overview

This blog is meant to provide guidance for getting started with using the “WebSphere – Deployment” plugin to deploy an application EAR to a Traditional WebSphere environment using IBM UrbanCode Deploy (now IBM DevOps Deploy).   This blog focuses on the initial configuration steps that are required and will not focus on the intricacies of the component process steps.

Review of Required Steps

The following steps are required to begin this process:

1. Download the “WAS -Deploy plugin”.   The plugin site is at this website URL: https://urbancode.github.io/IBM-UCx-PLUGIN-DOCS/UCD/

Scroll down to click on “WebSphere Application Server – Deployment” and the download the latest version.   The latest is currently “127.1131367” as of January 3, 2023.

2. Login to the IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) web console. Click on Settings at the top of the page and then click on Automation Plugins.   Click the “Load Plugin” button and browse to your downloaded plugin to install the “WAS – Deploy” plugin.  

When complete, you should see this in your list:

The “WAS – Deploy” plugin provides two capabilities:

• • It allows you to discover the topology of your WebSphere cell including the clusters, nodes, and servers.
  • It provides plugin steps to allow you to deploy your WebSphere applications.

3. Install a UCD Agent on the WebSphere Deployment Manager host. In this example, I will install the agent on a DEV instance.  

4. Configure the Resource Tree for your Application you want to deploy. Let’s say you would like to setup “WebSphere -> PlantsByWebSphere -> DEV”.

5. Add your new Agent under the DEV folder as shown below:

NOTE: the “WAS – Deploy” plugin will discover that the agent you added to the resource tree is a WebSphere Deployment Manager and you will find a child node under the agent as shown above.

6. Expand the agent node in the tree and then click on the right-hand menu for the dmgr child node (usually named :WebSphereCell”) by clicking on the three dots as shown below:

7. Click on the “Edit” menu item as shown above.
8. Before we can discover the topology of the cell, we need to tell UCD how to connect. We need to set the following values:

• • WebSphere Profile Path
  • WSAdmin Command Path
  • WebSphere User
  • WebSphere Password

9. Here are some screen shots from my example environment.   Here is the WSAdmin Command Path property:

NOTE: the trailing slash on the WSAdmin Command Path is very important!

NOTE: you should not need to modify the websphere.port, websphere.connType, or websphere.host property values.   If you have multiple profiles on a host, you can add them both to the websphere.profilePath using a comma (,) as a delimeter.

10. Click Save to update the property values.

11. For your WebSphere Cell node in the tree, click on the three dots on the right-hand side and select “Configure using WebSphere Topology Discovery” as shown below:

This will run a wsadmin script to discover the topology of your cell.   You should see output that looks like this in the output log as it discovers your nodes, clusters, and servers:

12. If you refresh the resource tree, you should now be able to expand your WebSphere cell node (in my case, “devops25Cell01”) to see your Nodes and ServerClusters. You can expand these folders as well as shown below:

13. Typically, you will deploy an application EAR to a cluster scope in a WebSphere ND environment. Add your Component under the cluster name as shown below:

My components are PBW-EAR and Online-Botanical-APP as shown above and they are deployed to DevCluster1.

14. Be sure to add the base resources for your application target environment.

   Click on the DEV environment text as shown above and then click "Add Base Resources" as shown below to map to the resource tree you configured earlier:

15. Once you have this in place, you can now deploy your application to the WebSphere environment.

An Example Component Process

The following screen capture provides an example of what a Traditional WebSphere component process can look like:

When you install the “WebSphere – Deployment” plugin, you will find the plugin steps under “Application Server -> Java” as shown below:

If you were to click on the pencil icon for any of these plugin steps, for example the ‘Stop Application’ step, you can view the hidden properties by clicking ‘Show Hidden Properties’.  You will find that the step will refer to the resource tree settings you configured earlier:

I hope you found this blog to be helpful to get you started in using the ‘WebSphere – Deployment’ plugin to support traditional WebSphere release automation with IBM UrbanCode Deploy.    Clients across the globe are utilizing IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) alongside this plugin to help them release their WebSphere application programs more frequently and reliably with proper governance to meet their business goals.

#UrbanCodeDeploy
#WebSphereApplicationServer(WAS)