Publishing your application
Overview
Publishing involves copying files to the correct location for the appserver to find and use them. In some cases, temporary copies of the server configurations may be created. You can either publish your application automatically or manually.
Automatically publishing to a server
If the "Automatically publish when starting servers" check box on the Server preferences page...
Window | Preferences | Server | Launching
...is selected, the server tools check to see if your project and files on the server are synchronized. If they are not, the project and the files are automatically updated when the server is either started or restarted.
In the workbench, you have several options to choose for the Publishing settings. You can set these Publishing settings by going into the Servers view, right-click the server and select Open. The Server editor opens. In the Overview page of the server editor, under the Publishing settings, you are going to find the following settings:
- Never publish automatically: Specifies the workbench should never publish files to the server.
- Automatically publish when resources change:
Specifies that when a change is made to the files running on the server, the number of seconds specified in the Publishing interval control will need to pass before the workbench calls a publish to happen on the server. However, if you make a subsequent change to the files before this time interval has completed, the publish is delayed as the timer is reset. The workbench makes a publish to the server only after the full time interval has passed.
If you set the publishing interval to 0 seconds, a change to the files running on the server should automatically request a publish command to occur.
In the workbench, the default setting is the Use automatic publishing settings option is enabled with a value set to the publishing interval.
In addition, under the Select enabled publishers list you can enable tasks to run during publishing:
- For WebSphere Application Server, there is a Deploy J2EE Modules check box enabled by default. This check box specifies to generate deployment code for J2EE modules at 1.4 (or earlier) specification-level. If you are publishing a J2EE module that contains a Web Service or enterprise bean and this check box is enabled, the workbench is going to generate the deployment code for these artifacts.
Manually publishing to a server
If you do not want to wait for the automatic publishing interval to pass, at anytime you can manually request the workbench to issue a publish command to the server. Each manual publish command causes a single publishing request to the server. To publish your application manually you can complete one of the following in the Servers view:
- Select the server and then click the
Publish to the server
icon located on the toolbar.
- Right-click the server and then select Publish.
For the Tomcat local server, J2EE publishing server and Static Web publishing server environments, clicking Publish to the server icon transfers publishable files outside the workbench. When publishing to one of these servers, you can select one of the following publishing method:
- Local copy to copy resources directly from one machine to another in the file system. This option is supported for Tomcat servers.
- FTP file transfer to copy resources from one machine to another using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This option is supported for J2EE Publishing Server or Static Web Publishing server.
There is a WebSphere File Transfer servlet application, filetransfer.ear file, available in the WAS v6.0 and v6.1, but is no longer needed for WAS v7.0. For WAS v6.x, this Websphere File Transfer servlet handles the publishing method automatically. If the WAS v6.x is set with security enabled, run this WebSphere File Transfer servlet (filetransfer.ear) application. By default, this application is installed and started on the WAS v6.x.
For a remote WAS, the Agent Controller is no longer required. If you are running a remote WAS v6.x in secured mode, the output of the server might not appear in the Console view. You need to run a redeployFileTransfer.jacl script to correct this problem, see Console output does not display for remote WAS v6.x topic for details.
All the projects defined in the server configuration that are associated with the selected server are published. The resources in these projects are transferred to the location that is defined by the server.
Related tasks
Creating a WAS
Setting publishing preferences for a WAS
Defining the server preference