Hot Deploy

Plugins which are hot deployed will need to be deployed separately to all of the Web Space Server nodes. Each node should, therefore, have its own hot deploy folder. This folder needs to be writable by the user under which Web Space Server is running, because plugins are moved from this folder to a temporary folder when they are deployed. This is to prevent the system from entering an endless loop, because the presence of a plugin in the folder is what triggers the hot deploy process.

When you want to deploy a plugin, copy that plugin to the hot deploy folders of all of the Web Space Server nodes. The hot deploy directory for Web Space Server when running on GlassFish is Glassfish home/domains/domain1/webspace/deploy. Depending on the number of nodes, it may be best to create a script to do this. Once the plugin has been deployed to all of the nodes, you can then make use of it (by adding the portlet to a page or choosing the theme as the look and feel for a page or page hierarchy).

Some containers contain a facility which allows the end user to deploy an application to one node, after which it will get copied to all of the other nodes. If you have configured your application server to support this, you won't need to hot deploy a plugin to all of the nodes, as your application server will handle it transparently. Make sure, however, that you use hot deploy mechanism to deploy plugins, as in many cases Web Space Server slightly modifies plugin.war files when hot deploying them.