CQ 5.5: Changes to the startup

Since already a month CQ 5.5  is out. See here for the major changes brought with this release.

Amongst the hundreds of new features I would like to point out a single one, which is probably the most intersting features for admins and operation people.
With CQ 5.5 the quickstart does no longer start a servlet engine with 2 webapplications deployed in it (crx.war for the CRX and launchpad.war for the OSGI container including Sling and CQ5 itself). But as now CRX has been adapted work inside an OSGI container it is possible to drop the artifical differentiation between CRX and the other parts of the system, but handle them alike inside Apache Felix. The same applies to the CQSE servlet engine; it’s now an service embedded into OSGI (so the server.log file is gone). So the quickstart starts the Felix OSGI container which then takes care of starting the repository services, the servlet engine and all other services introduced by Sling and CQ5. This streamlined the startup process a lot. And — finally — there is only 1 place where you need to change the admin password.

Speaking of the start script: It has changed also. Essentially it has been rewritten, and a lot of old cruft; when I started with Communique 3.5 the basic structure of the serverctl script was the same as of CQ 5.4. It is much easier to understand, but the out-of-the-box version has a major flaw, as it doesn’t redirect the stdout and stderr to dedicated logfiles, but let them print on the console. This at least annoying, but more often just a problem; for example the threaddumps of a Sun/Oracle JVM are printed to stdout and are lost then. Same applies to the garbage collection logs (if not redirected to a specific file).

So instead of

java $CQ_JVM_OPTS -jar $CQ_JARFILE $START_OPTS &
        echo $! > "conf/cq.pid"

use these lines:

(
        (
                java $CQ_JVM_OPTS -jar $CQ_JARFILE $START_OPTS &
                echo $! > "conf/cq.pid"
        )  | /usr/sbin/rotatelogs2 stdout.log 5M 2>&1
) &

It requires the rotatelogs2 utility (depends a bit on your system; might also be named as “rotatelogs”)     shipped with the Apache HTTPD webserver (SuSE Linux: apache2 package), and it enures that the logs are rotated correctly when their configured size (here: 5 megabytes) are reached.

(No need to report this on Daycare, it’s already submitted.)