Changing the GlassFish Admin Users's Password Programmatically

Friday, May 29, 2015 |

Recently, in the #glassfish channel on Freenode, a user was having trouble configuring GlassFish in a Docker environment. He was scripting the configuration of the server, but was having trouble setting the admin user's password, since the change-admin-password command takes input from stdin. Fortunately, there's REST API for that. This curl command will do what the user needs to do without any need for additional input:

curl  -X POST \
    -H 'X-Requested-By: YeaGlassFish' \
    -H "Accept: application/json" \
    -d id=admin \
    -d AS_ADMIN_PASWORD=password \
    -d AS_ADMIN_NEWPASSWORD=password2 \
    http://localhost:4848/management/domain/change-admin-password

Once the password is set, this same command can be used to change the password, but --user admin:$PASSWORD must be added to authenticate the request.

I should note that I don't think this is an officially supported way to execute asadmin commands. It works, but it may change, or it may go away. I would say that Oracle may not support doing this either, but they don't offer any support, so there's no harm there. :) Also note thatAS_ADMIN_PASWORD has a typo in it that may be fixed in future releases of the server. Caveat emptor! :)