Install JBoss Wildfly on Ubuntu 18.04

6 min readAug 8, 2019

WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is a Java EE certified application server authored by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat.

Wildfly is a production-ready, cross-platform and open-source application server that is flexible, lightweight and is based on pluggable subsystems that can be added or removed as needed.

Some of the key features of Wildfly are:

Incredible Web Performance and Scalability
Efficient Memory Management
Slim and Customizable Runtime
Powerful Server Administration
Unified Configuration & Management
Domain & Standalone Operational Modes
Concurrent and Fast Classloading
Full Java EE 8 Support

In this tutorial, we will go through the process of setting up the Wildfly server on Ubuntu 18.04. So let us begin.

Step 1 — Install JDK

Wildfly requires Java 8 or later versions to work. You can check and verify that Java is installed with the following command.

$ java -version

If java is not installed, you will see “java: command not found”. Run below commands to install Java.

$ sudo apt-get update$ sudo apt-get install default-jdk -y

After installation, check if java is installed correctly by executing below command

$ java -version

If Java is installed, the output should look similar to above depending upon what is the latest version of java at that time.

Step 2 — Download and Extract Wildfly Server

Check Wildlfy downloads page for latest releases before downloading. For this tutorial, we will download Wildfly 16.0.0.Final (Java EE Full & Web Distribution).

We are going to install Wildfly to /opt/ directory, so we will download the Wildfly package to that location.

Change directory to /opt/ and download Wildfly to that directory.

$ cd /opt$ sudo wget https://download.jboss.org/wildfly/16.0.0.Final/wildfly-16.0.0.Final.tar.gz

Extract the tar package and rename the extracted directory to wildfly. This will be Wildfly’s installation directory

$ sudo tar -xvzf wildfly-16.0.0.Final.tar.gz$ sudo mv wildfly-16.0.0.Final /opt/wildfly

Step 3 — Create User and Group for Wildfly

We should not run Wildfly under the root user for security reasons. Let’s create a group wildfly and add a user wildfly to it.

Additionally, the home directory of wildfly user will be the Wildfly’s installation directory i.e. /opt/wildfly/.

$ sudo groupadd wildfly$ sudo useradd -r -g wildfly -d /opt/wildfly -s /sbin/nologin wildfly

Step 4 — Change Permission and Ownership of the Wildfly Installation Directory

Next, we will modify ownership and permission of /opt/wildfly/ directory. We will also give executable permissions to /opt/wildfly/bin/ directory. While under /opt/ directory, run the following commands:

$ sudo chown -R wildfly: wildfly$ sudo chmod o+x /opt/wildfly/bin/

Step 5 — Creating a SystemD Service File for Wildfly

Create a configuration directory for Wildfly under /etc/ directory by the name wildfly.

$ cd /etc/$ sudo mkdir wildfly

Copy Wildfly configuration file /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/wildfly.conf to /etc/wildfly/ directory

$ sudo cp /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/wildfly.conf /etc/wildfly/

Next, copy Wildfly launch script (launch.sh) under /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/ to /opt/wildfly/bin/ directory

$ sudo cp /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/launch.sh /opt/wildfly/bin/

We need to make wildfly user as the owner of this script so that it can execute it:

$ sudo chown wildfly: /opt/wildfly/bin/launch.sh

Now, copy service definition file (wildfly.service) under /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/ to /etc/systemd/system/ directory

$ sudo cp /opt/wildfly/docs/contrib/scripts/systemd/wildfly.service /etc/systemd/system/

Open wildfly.service in an editor

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/wildfly.service

Make the changes marked as bold or you can simply copy/paste the below content as it is.

[Unit]Description=The WildFly Application Server
After=syslog.target network.target
Before=httpd.service[Service]Environment=LAUNCH_JBOSS_IN_BACKGROUND=1
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/wildfly/wildfly.conf
User=wildfly
Group=wildfly
LimitNOFILE=102642
PIDFile=/var/run/wildfly/wildfly.pid
ExecStart=/opt/wildfly/bin/launch.sh $WILDFLY_MODE $WILDFLY_CONFIG $WILDFLY_BIND
StandardOutput=null[Install]WantedBy=multi-user.target

Save and exit the file.

Reload systemd manager configuration and enable wildfly service on system startup

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload$ sudo systemctl enable wildfly

To start wildfly system service:

$ sudo systemctl start wildfly

Once the service is started, we can check the status by running below command:

$ sudo systemctl status wildfly

If the service started successfully, we should see something like below:

The Active status, as highlighted, above verifies that the service is up and running.

We can also tail the Wildfly server logs with below command:

$ sudo tail -f /opt/wildfly/standalone/log/server.log

Now access Wildfly server at:

http://<instance-public-ip>:8080/

Step 8 — Configure Wildfly Management Console

The Wildfly management console allows us to manage different aspects of the Wildfly server. e.g. configuring subsystems, server monitoring, managing deployments or access control.

By default, the management console is not made accessible remotely. To make it accessible remotely, we have to make small changes in 3 files. So let’s start

Open wildfly.conf file under /etc/wildfly/ directory

$ sudo nano /etc/wildfly/wildfly.conf

Add a line at the end as shown below:

Save and exit the file.

Now open launch.sh in /opt/wildfly/bin/ directory and change its contents as shown below:

$ sudo nano /opt/wildfly/bin/launch.sh

Save and exit the file

Finally, open Wildfly’s system service definition file (wildfly.service) under /etc/systemd/system/ and make the changes as shown below:

$ sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/wildfly.service

Save and exit the file

Since we have changed the service unit file, we have to inform the systemd manager

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Now restart the wildfly service

$ sudo systemctl restart wildfly

Once restarted, Access the Wildfly management console at:

http://<instance-public-ip>:9990

We can successfully access the management console but as shown above, we need a management user to login.

We can use the add-user.sh script, packaged with Wildfly server distribution, to create a management user. Run the script with below command:

$ sudo /opt/wildfly/bin/add-user.sh

Once prompted, select to add a management user and provide your desired username and password.

In the last prompt, for enabling remote access for this user write yes or y.

After providing the required information, the script will verify the user creation as shown above.

We need to restart Wildfly server so our user is picked up during boot.

$ sudo systemctl restart wildfly

Now if we access the management console again, it will prompt for HTTP basic authorization.

Provide the management user credentials that we created above and click ‘ok’:

Once successfully logged in, we land inside the management console

We have just done basic setup of wildfly server and enabled/configured remote access to administration and management console. This concludes our tutorial.

P.S. As a bonus, I have included some helpful resources below to get you started with Java EE application development. To test your Java EE application, you can deploy it on the Wildfly installation that you did using this tutorial.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment.