quick lesson with WLS 12C 12.1.3.0 WLS and losing your customisations

I’ve done a few posts about this, but thought I’d reiterate some of those posts.

When you start an instance the actual runtime location for the JAS files are read from a directory like the following.  Notice that it’s in the middleware\oracle_home

D:\oracle\Middleware\Oracle_Home\user_projects\domains\E1_Apps\servers\JWB01P_PPFIN_93\stage\JWB01P_PPFIN_93\app\webclient.war

When the application is started, these are replaced by the contents of

D:\jde_home\SCFHA\targets\JWB01P_PPFIN_93\owl_deployment\webclient.ear\app\webclient.war after every restart.

This is because the application has been deployed with the following staging mode:

Deployment Staging Mode	Behavior	When to Use
stage	The Administration Server first copies the deployment unit source files to the staging directories of target servers specified by theStaging Directory Name attribute. The target servers then deploy using their local copy of the deployment files.	§ Deploying small or moderate-sized applications to multiple WebLogic Server instances. § Deploying small or moderate-sized applications to a cluster.

Which can been seen here – when looking at the application definition in weblogic console

So if you are doing cool things in jsp files or skinning and changing colours – of course – that is TOTALLY unsupported.  You need to make these changes in the staging directory, so that when things are copied from staging, everything works.

Note that if you want to implement the “grizzly bear” approach, you actually patch the par file for the tools release and give it a different id.  You can then distribute the par file to your web servers and deploy.

This is what we do when we install google analytics for a client’s web environment.  We take their tools release and patch the par file.  They get a totally different listing in server manager, which they can deploy or regress at their own will.  How nice is that!