Download assets using the installUtility command

Overview

After we install Liberty, we can download assets to the local file system by running the installUtility command. Assets can be downloaded to a new directory, which we can then use as a repository, or to an existing directory-based repository. The installUtility command can access directory-based repositories both as uncompressed directories or as compressed directories in an archive file.

By default, the installUtility command is configured to download assets only from the public Liberty Repository. To download assets from a local directory-based repository or an instance of the Liberty Asset Repository Service, configure these repositories in the repositories.properties file.

Rather than downloading individual assets, we can download a wlp-featureRepo-<version>.zip archive file from IBM Fix Central. The .zip archive contains a directory-based repository of all features and addons for the particular fix pack of Liberty that we download from IBM Fix Central. Either...

Extract the archive file to populate a local directory-based repository.
Use the archive file to populate an instance of the Liberty Asset Repository Service.
Install assets directly from the compressed archive.

Assets that are not included in the .zip file must be downloaded using the installUtility command.

Download assets

Find assets applicable to our configuration. For example...
To find a specific type of asset, use the --type=[feature|sample|opensource|addon|all*] option. For example...
Download assets to a location. For example:
We can download multiple assets at once by separating each asset shortName with a space. For example...

After downloading assets to the local file system, we can add a local directory to the repository configuration so we can install assets from the directory.