Glassfish Startup Script for Linux Systems

I found a better resource for this than mine:
Run GlassFish V3 as a non-root Service

The above link covers Fedora/Ubuntu, but works for Red Hat as well.

Recently I was setting up a server that was to run Glassfish V3 on Red Hat EL5. The problem here is that Glassfish does not provide a start-up script for unix based systems. Also, the asadmin tool is unable to add Glassfish as a service like it does in Windows and Solaris, so where does that leave us, writing our own init script.

I will be honest, I'm not really a hardcore LINUX user, so there may be a better way to do this, but here's what I did.

In the {gfinstall}/glassfish/bin directory I created a new file, simply named glassfish. In this file I added the following script:

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          glassfish
# Required-Start:    $network
# Required-Stop:
# Default-Start:     3 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 2 6
# Short-Description: Glassfish Web Server
# Description:       Glassfish Web Server
### END INIT INFO


gfbin=/path/to/your/gfinstall/glassfish/bin


function usage
{
   echo "Must pass command line param start or stop"
}

while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
    case $1 in
        start )
               nohup $gfbin/startserv > /dev/null &
                                ;;
        stop )
               $gfbin/stopserv
                                ;;
        * )                     usage
                                exit 1
    esac
    shift
done

This script accepts the parameters start and stop, and that is all. No restart, no help, just start and stop. I did this because, it's really the only functionality you need, and it would have been a pain to try to do the restart (the stopserv command exits before the server has shut down).

Next, I linked this script into the /etc/init.d folder (using 'ln -s'). From that point, we can do a 'chkconfig glassfish on' and everything will be good to go. The information in the '### BEGIN INIT INFO' is what enables chkconfig to work. So don't remove it, you might want to change it though, depending on what you need.