It's been slightly more than a year since my last post, but my team had recently ventured into preparing our own deployment script. At the behest of an eager member, we'd built up a PowerShell script using PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit, also known as "PSAppDeployToolkit", or even shorter as PSADT. This was a script meant to automate installation of a number of programs on the target Windows machines, silently and automatically.
With the background of what we were doing established, this was about one specific setup we wanted to configure. One of the platforms we were using, was Tomcat 9. Fine, it was TomEE 9, using Tomcat 9, but you get the idea. Tomcat was to be installed as a service by the having our script chained to trigger the standard "service.install.as.admin.bat" script.
Then we realised that the JVM would default to "auto", which means using whichever JRE it can find. We prefer to stick to our version for consistency. The easiest was for us to edit the provided batch script. After finding this page of documentation, I started poking around the script more. We need the --Jvm="/path/to/the/jvm.dll" option added in.
The standard configuration out of the box is this:
"%EXECUTABLE%" //IS//%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--DisplayName=%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--StartClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StopClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StartParams start ^
--StopParams stop ^
--Startup auto ^
--JvmMs=512 ^
--JvmMx=1024 ^
--JvmSs=2048 ^
--StartMode jvm ^
--StopMode jvm ^
--LogLevel Info ^
--LogPrefix TomEE
So I just need to add it in, right? I tested.
"%EXECUTABLE%" //IS//%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--DisplayName=%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--StartClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StopClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StartParams start ^
--StopParams stop ^
--Startup auto ^
--Jvm=%PR_JVM% ^
--JvmMs=512 ^
--JvmMx=1024 ^
--JvmSs=2048 ^
--StartMode jvm ^
--StopMode jvm ^
--LogLevel Info ^
--LogPrefix TomEE
It seemed fine on the surface. And after more elaborate tests, I realised that doing so would break the Tomcat Service Manager. The memory values (JvmMs/JvmMx/JvmSs) would not take. Neither did the StartMode and StopMode parameters. I couldn't be certain if it was because of how the PSADT script worked. I'd only extracted the portion of our whole script for Tomcat to test on after all. After some more fumbling, I thought I could try adding it to the end, and gave it a shot. The command wouldn't recognise it past the LogPrefix parameter at that point. It was then that I decided to move it up 2 lines.
"%EXECUTABLE%" //IS//%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--DisplayName=%SERVICE_NAME% ^
--StartClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StopClass org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap ^
--StartParams start ^
--StopParams stop ^
--Startup auto ^
--JvmMs=512 ^
--JvmMx=1024 ^
--JvmSs=2048 ^
--StartMode jvm ^
--StopMode jvm ^
--Jvm=%PR_JVM% ^
--LogLevel Info ^
--LogPrefix TomEE
Ha! It finally worked. The JVM was no longer "auto", the memory values took effect, and the start/stop modes were in as well. There was very little details surrounding this specific configuration, much less documentation relating to this particular quirk of positioning the option correctly.
