Liberty Repository

The Liberty Repository provides an online mechanism to deliver Liberty and additional content, enabling a single point of access for various asset types. The Liberty Repository provides early access to supported new content, including new product capabilities, when they are delivered, rather than waiting for a new release.

The Liberty Repository also enables fast and simple integration with open source, more refined access to runtime capabilities, and quick access to configuration and administration resources for developers and operations teams.

Assets

Asset types available from the Liberty Repository are as follows:

Addons
Artifacts that are packaged to add new capabilities over an existing Liberty installation.
Config Snippets
Samples of Liberty server configurations for specific tasks.
Features
Individual units of server functionality that can be installed into the Liberty runtime environment.
Products
Simple archive installation packages of the Liberty server runtime environment.
Tools
Tools to enable development and test of Liberty-based applications and runtime extensions.

Features

The Liberty Repository enables immediate access to fully supported and production-ready features, without the need to wait for new product releases. The features that you add inherit the same support as your existing installation. For a full list of features that are available from the Liberty Repository, see Liberty features.

Offline access to Liberty Repository assets

In addition to accessing assets in the public, online Liberty Repository, you can create the following types of repositories to enable on-premises or offline access to Liberty Repository assets:
Liberty Asset Repository Service
An open-source service that you can use to create an on-premises repository that is remotely accessible behind the firewall of an enterprise. To get started with the service, see the WASdev/tool.lars project on GitHub.
Local directory-based repository
Local directory-based repositories that you create when you download assets by using the installUtility download command. For more information about the command, see Downloading assets using the installUtility command.

You can populate these repositories with your own customized content, or download Liberty Repository assets by using the installUtility download command. As an alternative to downloading individual assets, you can download a wlp-featureRepo-<version>.zip file from IBM Fix Central for WebSphere Application Server Liberty. The .zip file contains a directory-based repository of all features and addons for the particular fix pack of Liberty.

After you populate the repositories, you can install assets from them by using IBM Installation Manager or the installUtility install command.

Ways to access the Liberty Repository

You can access the Liberty Repository in the following ways:

Developer tools
The Liberty Repository is integrated in developer tools. These tools allow:
  • Installation of the server runtime environment from an archive
  • Installation of additional content, including features, samples and open source integrations
  • Post-installation content
  • Runtime and feature dependency awareness, searching and filtering, and configuration snippet inclusion
Installers
Assets can be installed from the Liberty Repository by using IBM® Installation Manager and command-line utilities.
  • IBM Installation Manager: If you have IBM Installation Manager installed, you can download and install assets from a local directory-based repository, an instance of the Liberty Asset Repository Service, or the online IBM Liberty Repository when you install Liberty or upgrade from a previous version of Liberty.
  • Command-line utilities:
    • installUtility: Find, obtain information about, and install assets that are in a local directory-based repository, an instance of the Liberty Asset Repository Service, or the public Liberty Repository.
    • featureManager: Install a feature from the public Liberty Repository and obtain details of features that are already installed.
      Note: The featureManager find, install, and uninstall actions are stabilized. For these actions, use the installUtility command instead.

For more information on the different methods available for installing Liberty Repository assets, see Installing Liberty Repository assets.

To access the Liberty Repository with limited internet access or through a firewall, ensure that you have access to the following hosts and ports:
  • public.dhe.ibm.com on port 443
  • asset-websphere.ibm.com on port 443