If you’re relying on the Biemond orawls and oradb puppet modules for managing Oracle and WebLogic in your Puppet® environment, there are some pressing issues you need to be aware of. These modules, once popular on Puppet® Forge, are on the brink of expiration. They haven’t been updated in over four years, and their GitHub repositories have been eerily quiet for just as long. Even worse, pull requests are gathering dust, unmerged, with no signs of life from the maintainers. But here’s the truth: Puppet® for Oracle and WebLogic is still very much alive and kicking.

Recently we have released version 3 of the wls_config module. This release shows our commitment to add more stability, better documentation and new features to our commercial modules compared to the Open Source versions. In this blog post, we will describe the changes.

“I would like to start using a configuration management tool like Puppet, but I don’t know how my system is configured!” In the era before configuration management tools, most systems would be built by hand. Command by command the system would be configured. If the sysadmin would spot a problem, he would fix it immediately. Change after change, this process would continue. Resulting in a running system but with a configuration that’s is not fully known and definitely not repeatable. In this blog article, we are going to show you how Puppet® can not only manage your configuration, but also help you to get to know all the details of your configuration.

WebLogic is a rich JEE container. There is a lot of stuff you can define and settings you need to manage. In the blog post “Using Puppet® to install and manage your WebLogic infrastructure”, we used Puppet® to install the basic WebLogic software and create a simple WebLogic domain. In this blog post we are going to show you how to use the custom types provided by the wls_config module, to extend this domain and add JMS servers, queues, and topics.

Without any tools, the installation and configuration of a WebLogic infrastructure is a big and complex task. Fortunately, our WebLogic installation and configuration modules make the task automatable and repeatable. But we know from our customers, that without any guidelines, it is still difficult to get started. There is so much to configure and so much install that it is hard to figure out where to start. To help you, we have implemented some extensive examples. In this blog post, I’m going to take you trough the setup we have made for a basic WebLogic installation.