Automating DVN installation

[Philip Durbin]

This week someone wrote in with a support ticket (#156037) about
automating DVN installation and I thought I'd reply with my thoughts
here on the list (in addition to replying to the ticket, of course).

> I am wondering if you could help me with automatic installation of
> DVN through a RPM package.
>
> Currently, the installers need to answer some questions during the
> installation process. Could these answers be put in a configuration
> file and read by the "install" program?

I've spent a little bit of time thinking about how to automate DVN installation.

First, let me say that in the beginning there was no installer script
at all. The script is a huge help in installing the DVN. I didn't
write it, but I'm a big fan of it.

I've created RPMs before and it's not too difficult for simple
packages but I don't know an easy way to make `yum install dvn`
possible. Getting `yum update dvn` to work without breaking things
would probably be trickier still. I'm somewhat concerned that `yum
install dvn` would be too one-size-fits-all... everyone might want a
slightly different setup.

I think the other suggestion above is much easier: adjusting the
installer script to accept a configuration file. I'm not saying it's
trivial, but it's certainly more do-able in the short term.

In practice, what I've done is adjust the installer script to my
liking before running it. (For example, on my Mac I didn't want to run
the script as root.) If you're familiar with Perl, the installer
script is pretty easy to hack on. Of course, if you make changes,
you'd want to compare your version of the script with the version that
ships with each new release of the DVN.

If anyone has any thoughts on automating DVN installation, please jump
in. The folks in #glassfish shared some ideas at
http://www.evanchooly.com/logs/%23glassfish/2013-03-27 which I linked
from http://irclog.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/2013-03-27#i_1682

Phil

p.s. The installer script asks you where you've installed Glassfish,
but since I'm writing about automation, I thought I'd mention that you
can feed an "answerfile" to Glassfish that looks like this:
https://github.com/dvn/dvn-install-demo/blob/master/modules/bucket/files/root/glassfish-answerfile

p.p.s. This just in from ##infra-talk:
http://www.slideshare.net/actionjackx/automated-java-deployments-with-rpm
via http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/how-i-my-java

--
Philip Durbin
Software Developer for http://thedata.org
http://www.iq.harvard.edu/people/philip-durbin