Virtual Hosting using Apache and GlassFish

Before we go too far, we need to make sure we’re all using various terms in the same manner. To summarize Shreedhar Ganapathy’s excellent discussion, a domain in GlassFish terms is an "administrative area." It should not be confused with DNS domains. A domain will have one or more servers defined. These servers correlate, roughly, with a ServerName in Apache’s httpd.conf (and, like a ServerName can have `ServerAlias`es, a server can be given aliases). For the sake of this discussion, we will not give any attention to clustering or load balancing.

Before a vhost environment can be set up, one must ask: Do the vhosts need to be completely separated from each other? That is to say, will the production environment need to be configured in such a way that an administrator for one group of servers can not touch another group of servers? If you intended to have one administrator admin all servers, you can probably get by with one domain. However, if you need to allow a user to administer his servers without having access to another user’s servers, then you will need to create additional domains. We’ll start with the simple case, and look at multiple servers in one domain.

We’ll start by configuring GlassFish. We’ll use two vhosts, vh1 and vh2. To add a virtual server from the admin console, go to Configuration→HTTP Service→Virtual Servers:

Click add, and fill out the form:

I’ve chosen to use http-listener-1 only, as I only care about http://vh1:8080/ being available. Repeat the process for server vh2. For those that prefer the command line, the server can be created with this command:

While there are a myriad of options regarding port usage, I like to have Apache handle requests on port 80, and forward requests for my vhosts to the appropriate server behind it, so let’s take a look at that configuration:

With that, your virtual hosts should be ready. To test that things are working correctly, let’s deploy two applications (which, I’m afraid, you’ll have to supply :) ).

Command line users can do:

With these apps deployed, http://vh1/AppA should get your app, while http://vh2/AppA should get a 404, and vice versa. If you deploy a third app and do not specify a virtual server:

then http://vh1/AppC and http://vh2/AppC will both work. Here are some rules to keep in mind:

If you need to segregate administrative control amongst users, such as in an ASP/ISP environment, then you will need multiple domains. When you setup the server, the default domain, domain1, is created for you. Since a domain is an administrative area, one can not use the admin console to create another domain, and must use the asadmin command line tool. A session might look something like this:

The documentation has this to say about domains:

That being so, each domain will have its own set of ports. Note the use of the portbase option above. That instructs asadmin to start allocating ports starting at 5000 according to this pattern: * Admin port: portbase + 48, HTTP * Listener port: portbase ` + 80 * IIOP listener port: `portbase + 37 * JMX port: portbase + 86

We specified the developer profile, as we do not need clustering, high availability, etc., for our purposes here, but please note that option if you do indeed need those capabilities.

With our domain created and start (asadmin start-domain mydomain), we can now begin creating virtual servers and deploying applications in the same manner we did above. Note that, for those using Apache as the front end, the virtual host configuration will need to be adjusted accordingly:

and that your admin console is listening at http://localhost:5048/.

That should get you going! There are some details that have been glossed over (such as memory usage), but you should now have in your hands a step-by-step guide on creating, configuring, and maintaining virtual servers using GlassFish. If you have any questions, comments, corrections, etc., please feel free to leave a comment.