© The WildFly Authors.

Zipped distribution, Galleon provisioning, WildFly Maven Plugin or bootable JAR, this guide helps you identify the installation strategy that best fits your application requirements.

1. WildFly or WildFly Preview

The WildFly project now produces two appserver variants, standard WildFly and WildFly Preview, so you’ll want to decide which is right for you. For most users the standard WildFly variant is the right choice, but if you’d like a technical preview look at what’s coming in the future, try out WildFly Preview.

2. Installing WildFly from a zipped distribution

Downloading the WildFly release zip and unzipping it is the traditional way to install a complete WildFly server with support for both standalone and managed domain operating modes. A WildFly distribution contains a large number of default configurations allowing you to select the server features and operating modes.

A WildFly distribution based installation is well suited when:

  • You want to rely on a traditional Jakarta EE application deployment.

  • You want a Jakarta EE or MicroProfile platform compliant server that offers all Jakarta EE or MicroProfile features.

  • You are not (yet) concerned by server installation size and memory footprint.

  • You are not yet sure of the kind of operating mode and application you are targeting.

  • Your server instances will contain one or more application deployments.

If that is the kind of installation you are aiming at, the guides that you should read next are:

3. Installing WildFly with Galleon

Galleon provisioning tooling allows you to construct a customized WildFly installation according to your application needs. Some applications don’t need a fully featured server supporting all operating modes and containing all Jakarta EE capabilities. Galleon tooling allows you to select the server capabilities you want to see installed.

A WildFly server provisioned with Galleon is well suited when:

  • You want to rely on a traditional Jakarta EE application deployment.

  • You want to easily update an installation to the latest WildFly version.

  • Your application requires only a subset of the Jakarta EE or MicroProfile platform APIs (although Galleon can provision a server that supports the full set of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile platform APIs).

  • You are concerned by server installation size and memory footprint.

  • You are only using standalone operating mode (with support for High Availability or not).

  • Your server instances will contain one or more application deployments.

If that is the kind of installation you are aiming at, the guides that you should read next are:

4. Installing WildFly with the WildFly Maven Plugin

The WildFly Maven Plugin exposes a package goal that allows you to provision a customized WildFly installation containing your application.

Using the WildFly Maven Plugin is well suited when:

  • You are building your application using Maven.

  • Your application requires only a subset of the Jakarta EE or MicroProfile platform APIs (although the WildFly Maven Plugin can provision a server that supports the full set of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile platform APIs).

  • You are concerned by server installation size and memory footprint.

  • You are only using standalone operating mode (with support for High Availability or not).

  • Your server instances will contain one or more application deployments.

  • You are using WildFly Helm Charts to deploy your application on the cloud.

If that is the kind of installation you are aiming at, the guide that you should read next is:

  • The WildFly Maven Plugin Guide shows you how to configure a Maven pom.xml file to provision a customized WildFly server containing your application.

5. WildFly Bootable JAR

A bootable JAR contains both a customized WildFly server and your deployment. Such a JAR can then run with a simple java command such as java -jar myapp-bootable.jar

A bootable JAR is built using Maven. You need to integrate the WildFly Maven plugin in the Maven project of your application.

The ability to build a WildFly Bootable JAR has been added to the WildFly Maven Plugin. The use of the WildFly Bootable JAR Maven plugin has been deprecated.

A Bootable JAR is well suited when:

  • You want to leverage your existing WildFly applications.

  • You want to build a microservice composed of a server and a single application deployment.

  • You are concerned by JAR size and memory footprint.

  • You are only using standalone operating mode (with support for High Availability or not).

  • You are building your application using Maven.

If that is the kind of installation you are aiming at, the guides that you should read next are:

  • The WildFly Maven Plugin Guide shows you how to configure a Maven pom.xml file to provision a customized WildFly server containing your application.

  • The Bootable JAR Guide shows you how to package your application and the WildFly server into a bootable JAR.