Helm Chart for WildFly in OpenShift Developer Console

By Jeff Mesnil | July 13, 2021

We have recently released a Helm Chart for WildFly and wrote an article about it. Since that article, we have submitted this Helm Chart to the OpenShift Developer Console.

It is now possible to build and deploy a WildFly application in OpenShift directly from its Developer Console. In this article, we will show the steps to do so.

We will use Red Hat Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift as our OpenShift cluster.

For this article, we will use the same microprofile-config quickstart for WildFly that we used in our initial article about the Helm Chart.

Install a Helm Release

Once you have logged in your OpenShift Developer Sandbox, the steps to install a WildFly application are:

Go to the OpenShift Developer Console (in the </> Developer perspective in the left hand menu)
Click on +Add, then Helm Chart, then WildFly (at the time of this writing, the exact version is WildFly v1.4.0)
Click on the Install Helm Chart button

At this point, we need to configure the chart to be able to build and deploy the microprofile-config quickstart.

First, we will change the name of the release to my-wildfly-app in the Release Name text field instead of the default wildfly name.
We can configure the Helm Chart either using a Form View or a YAML View. We will use the YAML View by checking the button in the Configure via box.
Then, we will change the YAML content to configure the Helm Chart by copying the following content in the YAML view instead of the existing content:

build:
  uri: https://github.com/wildfly/quickstart.git
  ref: 24.0.0.SP1
  mode: bootable-jar
  env:
  - name: ARTIFACT_DIR
    value: microprofile-config/target
  - name: MAVEN_ARGS_APPEND
    # Use the bootable-jar-openshift profile to ensure that the application
    # can be deployed on OpenShift but disable JKube as the image will be
    # built and deployed by this chart.
    value: -am -pl microprofile-config -Pbootable-jar-openshift -Djkube.skip=true
  - name: MAVEN_OPTS
    value: '-XX:MetaspaceSize=251m -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m'
deploy:
  replicas: 1
  env:
  - name: CONFIG_PROP
    value: Hello from OpenShift

This is the same YAML content that we used in the inital article when we install the Helm Chart from the command line.

Finally, we click on the Install button to finish the installation. This will open the Topology view with a graphical represenation of the Helm realease (named my-widlfly-app) and its associated resources:

Figure 1. Helm Release of the application displayed in OpenShift Topology view

The Helm Release (abbreviated HR) is named my-wildlfy-app and uses the WildFly icon to shows that this release is managed by the Helm Chart for WildFly. It includes a Deployment resource (abbreviated D) also named my-wildlfy-app.

When build is finished (the bottom-left icon will display a green check) and the application is deployed (the circle outline is in dark blue), you can go the the URL (using the top-right icon) from the route associated to the deployment, append /config/value and you will see the message:

Hello from OpenShift

This message corresponds to the CONFIG_PROP environment variable defined in the Helm Chart YAML file.

Congratulations, you have built and deployed your first Java application with WildFly on OpenShift!

Upgrade the Helm Release

It is possible to upgrade the Helm Release to change its configuration from the OpenShift Developer Console.

Click on the Helm in the left hand menu
Click on the my-wildfly-app link to open the page specific to our Helm release.
Click on the Actions menu in the right of the page and select Upgrade. This will show the Upgrade Helm Release page.

The YAML View in that page contains some additional content compared to what was initially pasted. The OpenShift developer console aggregates some of the chart’s default values with the YAML content we provided.

Let’s say we want to modify the message returned by our application. We will change the value of the CONFIG_PROP environement variable to Bonjour depuis OpenShift (instead of Hello from Openshift)

deploy:
  ...
  env:
    - name: CONFIG_PROP
      value: Bonjour depuis OpenShift

At this point, we click on Upgrade to upgrade the Helm release.

As we have only modified the deploy section of the Helm release, we will reuse the existing application image and redeploy it with the new environment variable. Once the application is redeployed, if we click on the Route button and append /config/value, we see that the application has correctly been upgraded:

Bonjour depuis OpenShift

Warning

Prior to OpenShift 4.8, there was a bug preventing to directly upgrade the Helm Release.

To workaround that error, we had to reload the initial Chart version and apply our changes.

Copy the modified content of the YAML view.
Change the "Chart version" in the right hand corner from 1.4.0 / App Version 24.0 to 1.4.0 / App Version 24.0 (Provided by Red Hat Helm Charts). A confirmation window will open, click on Proceed to accept the change
Paste the YAML content that was just copied back in the YAML view

We can now click on the Upgrade button to finally upgrade the Helm release.

Conclusion

Now that the Helm Chart for WildFly is included by default in OpenShift Developer console, it is straightforward to build and deploy WildFly application in an OpenShift cluster.

It is also possible to upgrade the Helm release so that it remains the source of any configuration from the application, although we need to reset the Chart version every time we want to apply such an upgrade.

Helm Chart for WildFly in OpenShift Developer Console

Install a Helm Release

Upgrade the Helm Release

Conclusion

More information