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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T21:17:01+00:00

After spending a couple of hours trying to understand how to make continuous deployment

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After spending a couple of hours trying to understand how to make continuous deployment work in the case of an OSGi-based application, I am finally posing my first question on stackoverflow, hoping for some indications on what I might have done wrong or missed – somehow I feel being on the wrong track…

This is what I want to achieve:

  1. build some bundles and install them to the maven repository (no problem here, using bnd)

  2. now having all the bundles making up my application (passing all tests and so on), I want to deploy and run the application, that is, start some OSGi framework using those bundles.

  3. Starting is not the issue – “mvn pax:provision -Dframework=equinox” does the trick. My application starts jetty, so it is easy to verify via a browser to see if things look ok (additionally to all the tests)

  4. But, now, trying being “continuous”, the next time I want to apply this procedure, I really should make sure to shut down the running instance of my application first (releasing at least the port being used). So, to rerun everything, I somehow have to shut down the old installation first.

And this is where my question starts: Is there anything helping me with this? I understand there is the maven-deploy-plugin, but this only seems to be useful when deploying some WAR/EAR file into some standard application container (without the need of restarting it seems).

I really only need to run some script to start up the OSGi enviroment – and then, next time, to shut it down gracefully before I start it again. With tomcat, jetty, jboss and the like, there are some shutdown.sh scripts or mvn jetty:stop instructions, but do I really have to write those kind of scripts myself? This is where I think I am starting to be on the wrong track, somebody must have had those issues before me and solved them I guess 😉

I understood that I could somehow try to use JMX or use the telnet console to access the running instance to issue an “stop 0” command but this feels wrong.

Processes started from jenkins should compile/build/deploy projects, but not start long-running threads I guess, so I somehow have to start some process “outside” which I want to kill first the next time I try it again.

Any ideas? Maybe I am missing something? Thanks in advance for any input on this!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The telnet way seems to be the cleanest in my opinion.

    However, if you want to be creative you can create a simple shutdown bundle that you install before you get ready to redeploy. Make sure you have auto-deploy on so the bundle is activated when installed. When this bundle activates it’s job is to cleanly shutdown the current running Equinox container.

    I would still suggest the telnet approach as you need to make sure your container is shutdown before you attempt to redeploy.

    If you don’t like any of these approaches take a look at Apache Karaf. You can send a running container commands. You can even stop, uninstall then reinstall all your bundles without ever stopping Karaf.

    Karaf can run on top of Apache Felix or Eclipse Equinox.

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