Inspired by Sven Hasselbach's blog posts, this project wraps Open Liberty, the open-source version of WebSphere Liberty, to run alongside the Domino HTTP task.
Like the original blog posts, this provides access to Domino classes and the surrounding Domino server environment. At least in initial testing, unlike the blog posts, accessing databases on the server doesn't cause a panic, allowing this to run alongside normal Domino server operations.
This project does not enhance the Domino HTTP stack in any way. The traditional HTTP task continues as normal, with its same abilities and limitations.
Additionally, this doesn't give the Liberty server any particular knowledge of how Domino normally works - it won't serve resources from NSFs on its own, nor does it automatically have access to the XPages OSGi framework.
- Domino 9.0.1 FP10 or newer
The Open Liberty runtime can be installed either as a set of OSGi plugins running with Domino's HTTP runtime or using the RunJava command. In both cases, create a new database named libertyadmin.nsf in the root of your server using the provided NTF before loading the runtime.
To install via OSGi, install the contents of the UpdateSite directory on your Domino server, either via an Update Site NSF or in the data directory.
To install via RunJava, copy the JAR file from the RunJava directory into either the jvm/lib/ext directory or the ndext directory in your Domino installation. The runtime can be loaded by running load runjava WLP on the console or at startup adding runjava WLP to the ServerTasks notes.ini property. In these cases, "WLP" is case-sensitive.
After it is installed, open the admin NSF and add at least one server document. When HTTP is (re-)started on the server, servers configured here will be automatically deployed and launched. Additionally, if you create a "Dropin App" response document, you can attach .war files that will be automatically deposited in the "dropins" folder in the server. These applications can also be manually deployed there or added in the server.xml, as with a normal Open Liberty runtime.
The runtime supports several Domino console commands, all of which are prefixed by tell wlp:
status: Displays the status of all running Liberty servers. This is equivalent to theserver status $namecommand in the Liberty packagestop: Stops all running Liberty serversstart: Starts all configured Liberty serversrestart: Equivalent tostopfollowed bystarthelp: Get a listing of currently-supported optionsrefresh: Refreshes the configuration from the NSF without restarting unchanged servers
The installation contains a reverse proxy that can be enabled in the main configuration document of libertyadmin.nsf. In there, you can specify ports to listen on as well as a TLS private key and certificate chain, if desired. By default, the reverse proxy will relay all requests to the Domino server, while individual WAR apps deployed to Liberty servers can also be included via their documents. When they are marked as such, their context roots will be forward to them first, rather than to Domino.
Deployed Liberty servers are installed with several custom features, which can be enabled per-server in the server configuration document in the NSF.
The notesRuntime-1.0 feature handles initialization and termination of the Notes runtime for the Liberty process, allowing individual web apps to skip this step and not compete. This feature sets the Java property notesruntime.init to "true" when enabled, so apps can check for that and skip process initialization.
This feature allows the use of Domino credentials for Liberty authentication, when applicable. It proxies authentication requests through to the backing Domino server specified by Domino_HTTP, and so it should allow any authentication that is configured on the Domino server. By default, Domino_HTTP is configured to be the local server, but it can be overridden in server.env.
Additionally, it allows for a shared login by proxying cookies containing Domino authentication information to the backing Domino server to determine the username.
This uses a servlet on the Domino side that responds to local requests only by default. To allow this service to respond to non-local requests, set the notes.ini property WLP_IdentityServlet_LocalOnly to 0.
Code that uses the Notes runtime should take care to terminate all Notes-initialized threads, as leaving threads open may lead to server crashes. In practice, these steps have helped avoid trouble:
- Ensure that any
ExecutorServicethat contains Notes threads is shut down properly in aServletContextListener - Run any Notes-based code in infrastructure listeners (such as
ServletContextListeners) inside explicitNotesThreads and useThread#jointo wait for their results
Building this project requires the presence of a p2 update site of the Domino XPages runtime. A version of this site matching Domino 9.0.1 is available from OpenNTF, and an updated version can be created from a Notes or Domino installation using the generate-domino-update-site tool. Put the file:// URL for this update site in the notes-platform property of your Maven configuration.
Additionally, to compile the Admin NSF via Maven and generate the final distribution, you will need to set up and configure a compilation server or local runtime using the NSF ODP Tooling project.
The code in the project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The runtime may download software licensed under compatible licenses - see NOTICE for details.