Chapter 4. Fabric Profiles
Abstract
A profile is the basic unit of deployment in a fabric. This chapter describes how to create, edit, and deploy profiles into containers. You can also create different versions of a profile, which makes it possible to support rolling upgrades across the containers in your fabric.
4.1. Introduction to Profiles
Overview
A profile is a description of how to provision a logical group of containers. Each profile can have none, one, or more parents, which allows you to have profile hierarchies. A container can be assigned one or more profiles. Profiles are also versioned, which enables you to maintain different versions of each profile, and then upgrade or roll back containers, by changing the version of the profiles they use.
What is in a profile?
A profile can contain one or more of the following resources:
- OSGi bundle URLs
- Web ARchive (WAR) URLs
- Fuse Application Bundle (FAB) URLs
- OSGi Configuration Admin PIDs
- Apache Karaf feature repository URLs
- Apache Karaf features
- Maven artifact repository URLs
- Blueprint XML files or Spring XML files (for example, for defining broker configurations or Camel routes)
- Any kind of resource that might be needed by an application (for example, Java properties file, JSON file, XML file, YML file)
- System properties that affect the Apache Karaf container (analogous to editing
etc/config.properties) - System properties that affect installed bundles (analogous to editing
etc/system.properties)
Profile hierarchies
Frequently, multiple profiles share a lot of configuration details: such as common frameworks, libraries, and so on. Defining these details separately for each profile would create a considerable maintenance headache. To avoid duplication across profiles, therefore, Fabric uses a hierarchical model for profiles. You can define a generic profile (base profile) containing the common configuration details, and then define child profiles that inherit these generic configuration details.
Some basic profiles
Fabric provides a rich set of predefined profiles, which can be used as the basic building blocks for defining your own profiles. Some of the more interesting predefined profiles are:
- [default]
- The
defaultprofile defines all of the basic requirements for a Fabric container. For example it specifies thefabric-agentfeature, the Fabric registry URL, and the list of Maven repositories from which artifacts can be downloaded. - [karaf]
- Inherits from the
defaultprofile and defines the Karaf feature repositories, which makes the Apache Karaf features accessible. - [feature-camel]
- Inherits from
karaf, defines the Camel feature repositories, and installs some core Camel features: such ascamel-coreandcamel-blueprint. If you are deploying a Camel application, it is recommended that you inherit from this profile. - [feature-cxf]
- Inherits from
karaf, defines the CXF feature repositories, and installs some core CXF features. If you are deploying a CXF application, it is recommended that you inherit from this profile. - [mq-base]
- Inherits from the
karafprofile and installs themq-fabricfeature - [mq-default]
- Inherits from the
mq-baseprofile and provides the configuration for an A-MQ broker. Use this profile, if you want to deploy a minimal installation of an ActiveMQ broker. - [jboss-fuse-full]
- Includes all of the features and bundles required for the JBoss Fuse full container.
