This page introduces how to customize a server with plugins from the existing one to meet requirements of your application.

Building a plugin

By far the easiest way to build a Geronimo plugin is with maven using the car-maven-plugin to build a module. Any such module will include a geronimo-plugin.xml descriptor with at least minimal information. When possible, such as the description and license, this information is taken from the pom itself. Normally you will build the dependency list from the modules dependencies which are constructed from the maven dependencies plus whatever additional dependencies the deployers determine are needed. For instance an ejb application will have the openejb plugin added as a dependency by the openejb deployer. If necessary you can specify the dependencies for both the module and plugin descriptor explicitly in the car-maven-plugin configuration.

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The admin console also allows limited editing of geronimo-plugin.xml files but editing the information about how the plugin fits into the server is not yet supported.

Installing plugins

If the appropriate admin console plugin is installed (and your geronimo server includes web app support) you can install plugins from a plugin repository. After selecting the "plugins" page from the navigation menu select the plugin repository you want, such as your local maven repository if you have been building your own plugins. Next you see a list of available plugins from the repository. Select multiple plugins using the checkboxes or a single plugin as a link, and on the next page you will see more information on the plugins. On your approval the plugins will be downloaded and installed.

Alternatively you can use gshell to install plugins using the deploy/list-plugins command. This can be run with a command line or interactively. Interactively you can select the plugin repository to use (if more than one is known), and then select the plugins to install. Again, they will be downloaded and installed. An example of command line usage will be seen in later when we discuss assembling a server.

Assembling a server from an existing server.

Just as with installing plugins, this can be done from the admin console, gshell, and the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin. In the admin console you specify the groupId and artifactId of the server you want, the version, the target path and the archive type and then select the plugins you want installed. The server will be assembled in var/temp by default.

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