Deploying Applications From the Command Line

As noted in the section Starting an Instance, all Payara Micro actions are run for the Payara Micro JAR, all in one command; it is not possible to start an instance with one command, and deploy an application to it with another.

The general structure of starting, configuring, and deploying an application to an instance is as follows:

Payara Micro creates a directory where it creates the equivalent of the Payara Server domain directory in order to run properly. With the command line parameter --rootdir one can specify the location of this directory.

It is important to specify this value in production scenarios because the default value is in the temporary directory of the OS which can be cleaned by some processes. If this happens, the application will not behave correctly anymore.

If the <directory-path> doesn’t exist, it is created on the fly.

To deploy a WAR file to an instance, you need to use the --deploy option, followed by the path to the application to deploy. See below for an example of starting a Payara Micro instance and deploying a WAR file:

An exploded war can be deployed to a Payara Micro instance just be specifying the path to the exploded war root directory on the --deploy command line or via the API. The exploded war can be redeployed by creating a file .reload in the root directory of the exploded war and updating its timestamp for example using touch .reload in a LINUX machine.

If you want to deploy multiple applications to an instance with the --deploy option, you must use it once for each application to be deployed; it does not accept multiple paths.

For example, to deploy 2 applications:

Alternatively, you can use the --deploymentDir option. This option specifies a directory to scan for deployable archives, allowing you to store all of the applications you wish to be deployed in a directory, and have them be deployed automatically upon instance startup.

You can deploy an application directly from a Maven repository using the --deployFromGAV option. This option accepts a comma separated string denoting a Maven artefact’s groupId, artifactId, and version attributes.

This option can be used multiple times, and in conjunction with the standard --deploy options.

By default, Payara Micro will only search for artefacts in the Maven Central repository. If you wish to search additional repositories, you can add them to the list of repositories to search with the --additionalRepository option:

To search through multiple additional repositories, you can simply specify the option multiple times:

The context root of an application can be specified using the option --contextroot or by appending the path to the war-file name given with the --deploy parameter.

A context root set using the option --contextroot <context-path> applies to the applciation of the first --deploy parameter that does not already specify a context root with its --deploy option.

The root context of the example.war application is now set to /hello-world.

Alternatively the context root can be included in the argument to the --deploy option. It follows the path to the war file separated by File.pathSeparator:

The above command again results in the effective root context /hello-world.

The two methods can also be used together:

Here example.war is deployed in /foo while test.war is deployed in /bar.