You can administer the Liberty profile from the command prompt, configure it with web server plug-ins, and capture its status. You can package a Liberty server configuration along with the applications that it runs, for distribution to colleagues, or installation on other systems. If available, you can use the Equinox OSGi console to aid with debugging.
About this task
The server.xml file is the primary configuration file for the server. You can edit this file, and the files it includes, in a text editor. You can also change the location of the server.xml file. However, for most configurations you do not need to do this.
The bootstrap.properties file is used to specify properties that need to be available before the main configuration is processed. If you update the bootstrap.properties file, you must restart the server for the changes to take effect.
Subtopics
- Customizing the Liberty profile environment
You can customize the Liberty profile environment by using certain specific variables to support the placement of product binary files and shared resources in read-only file systems. - Administering the Liberty profile from the command prompt
You can use the server command and ws-server.jar executable JAR file to create a server, to start, or stop a server, to check if it is running, or debug a server. - Adding and removing Liberty features
Features are the units of functionality by which you control the pieces of the runtime environment that are loaded into a particular server. To add or remove a Liberty feature, you add or remove an XML snippet in the <feature> subelement of the server.xml configuration file. When you add or remove Liberty features, the changes are applied dynamically. - Using include elements, variables, and Ref tags in configuration files
You can keep all your configuration settings in a single server.xml file, or you can use include elements to consolidate configuration settings from separate files. You can use variables in the configuration to avoid hardcoding values that might not be appropriate when the configuration is reused in different environments. You can use Ref tags to refer to (and thereby reuse) existing code blocks that are defined elsewhere in the configuration. - Controlling dynamic updates
There are three types of dynamic update that can be controlled through configuration: changing the server configuration; adding and removing applications; updating installed applications. For all deployed applications, you can configure whether application monitoring is enabled and how often to check for updates to applications. For the "dropins" directory, you can also configure the name and location of the directory and choose whether to deploy the applications that are in the directory. - Configuring class loaders and libraries for Java EE applications
By default, each application can access a set of provided APIs and its own internal classes and libraries. You can override the default settings, and configure class loading for each application. - Configuring a web server plug-in for the Liberty profile
You can configure a web server plug-in so that, when the web server receives an HTTP request for dynamic resources, the request is forwarded to the Liberty profile. - Configuring session persistence for the Liberty profile
When session data must be maintained across a server restart or an unexpected server failure, you can configure the Liberty profile to persist the session data to a database. This configuration allows multiple servers to share the same session data, and session data can be recovered in the event of a failover. 
Configuring server managed ExecutorService instances
You can configure application server managed ExecutorService instances to run asynchronous tasks with the specified context. It is a best practice for Java™ EE applications to avoid directly managing their own threads; therefore, the managed ExecutorService extends the JSE Executor to provide a way to execute asynchronous tasks within an application server environment. You might also configure the managed Executor Service to propagate various contexts that are relevant to Java EE applications to the thread of the asynchronous task.- Connecting to the Liberty profile by using JMX
This topic describes how to access Java Management Extensions (JMX) connectors on the Liberty profile. You can also access the secured JMX connector remotely by using SSL. - Establishing a JMX MBean Liberty server connection
You can use Jython-based scripts to establish a Java Management Extensions (JMX) MBean Liberty server connection. - Configuring binary logging in the Liberty Profile
Use this information as a guide for configuring binary logging in your Liberty profile. - Administering the transaction service on the Liberty profile
The Liberty profile provides many of the same transaction services that are provided in the WebSphere Application Server full profile. If an application uses two or more resources, the Liberty profile transaction manager coordinates the updates to all the resource managers under a global transaction. In the Liberty profile, transaction services are implicitly activated when you specify features that require the use of transactions; for example, jpa-2.0, jdbc-4.0, and wasJmsServer-1.0. - Administering data access applications on the Liberty profile
The Liberty profile provides support to the data access applications using Liberty features such as jdbc-4.0 and other features. - Administering web applications on the Liberty profile
The Liberty profile provides support to the web applications using Liberty features such as servlet-3.0, jsp-2.2, and other features.
Example
All the elements that can be configured in the server.xml file,
and the files it includes, are described in Liberty profile: Configuration elements in the server.xml file.
However, the only required element is a server definition:
<server/>Beyond this server definition,
you only specify overrides and additions to the default configuration
values. For example, to change the transaction timeout value, you
specify:
<transactions timeout="30" />Some
attributes can have multiple values. For example, you use a list of
values to define the features that are to be provided by the server:
<server>
<featureManager>
<feature>servlet-3.0</feature>
<feature>localConnector-1.0</feature>
</featureManager>
</server>Where multiple
instances of a resource type can be configured, for example applications
or data sources, you need only provide the attributes that are unique
for the resource. You can let the other attributes use the default
values, or override them as needed. Therefore the contents of the server.xml file
can be brief. For example, here is a complete server configuration
to run a web application:
<server>
<featureManager>
<feature>servlet_3.0</feature>
</featureManager>
<application name="snoop" location="/mywebapps/snoop" id="snoop" type="war"/>
</server>For detailed information about specific aspects of server configuration, see the subtopics.
Task topic