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psadmin-plus 2.0

About 2 years ago, Kyle released psadmin-plus, a bash utility to help automate and simplify domain management. We happy to announce psadmin-plus is now at 2.0!

psadmin-plus makes is easy to start, stop, reconfigure, purge cache, and more for your PeopleSoft domains:

psa stop app HDEV
psa start web HDEV
psa bounce all HDEV

Version 2.0 is all command-line driven and has a number of changes and improvements from the original release.

Ruby Gem

First, psadmin-plus was re-written as a Ruby Gem. The original version was a bash script for Linux. A little while later, a powershell version was created for Windows. We chose to re-write psadmin-plus in Ruby so it could be a cross-platform tool. One code line makes is much easier to implement features for both platforms.

The second benefit of re-writing as a Ruby Gem is installation is much easier. This command is all you need to install psadmin-plus:

gem install psadmin_plus

When updates to psadmin-plus are released, you can upgrade with:

gem update psadmin_plus

You will need Ruby installed on your system for gem and psadmin-plus command to work. If you used the DPK to build you system Ruby is already available. (For Windows, if you use the DPK’s version of Ruby, the RubyGems SSL trusted certificate is out of date. Run these commands to uppdate the RubyGems trusted certificate.)

Configuration File

psadmin-plus has a number of configuration options to customize the behavior of you system. You can set these options with environment variables, but version 2.0 supports the use of a configuration file. You use the file ~/.psa.conf to set your configuration options. You can also change the file by setting PS_PSA_CONF=/path/to/conf.file. Here is a sample of what your .psa.conf file would look like:

PS_POOL_MGMT=on
PS_MULTI_HOMES=c:\psft\cfg
PS_WIN_SERVICES=web
PS_HEALTH_FILE=host.html

For a full list of configuration options for psadmin-plus, check out the README on the GitHub repository.

Windows Service Support

The first version of psadmin-plus for Windows started and stopped domains via psadmin. Many Windows admins prefer to start their domains with the Windows Services. Setting the configuration options PS_WIN_SERVICES will tell psadmin-plus to start and stop domains via the start-service and stop-service command-let. The PS_WIN_SERVICES setting has a number of options. You can specify all to start all domains with services, tux to start the Tuxedo domains with services, or specify one of web, app, prcs if you want to call out a specific type.

If you start domains via the command line, but have Windows services defined, we want to keep the service status in sync. The PS_TRAIL_SERVICE option will do just that. If you enable that setting, psadmin-plus will start or stop the domain via psadmin and then start or stop the respective Windows service. This ensures that the Windows service status matches the status of your domain.

psadmin-plus assumes you are using the DPK service names, but you can override that if you used a different method for creating Windows services. The defaults are:

"Psft*Pia*#{domain}*"
"Psft*App*#{domain}*"
"Psft*Prcs*#{domain}*"

If you want to change those names, you can add these settings in your .psa.conf file:

WEB_SERVICE_NAME="#{domain}-pia"
APP_SERVICE_NAME="#{domain}-AppServer"
PRCS_SERVICE_NAME"#{domain}-Batch"

Fill out the value to match your naming convention, but you must include #{domain}. That is how psadmin-plus finds your service.

Multi-PS_CFG_HOME Support

One last feature we added to psadmin-plus is support for multiple PS_CFG_HOME folders. By default psadmin-plus assumes you have one config home folder on the server for all your domains. If you have more than one config home, you can set the environment variable PS_MULTI_HOMES to the base folder where your config homes live. For example, if c:\psft\cfg stored your config homes, you can set PS_MULTI_HOMES=c:\psft\cfg, and psadmin-plus will look under there for your config homes.

There is one assumption though with multi-config home support: the domain name matches the config home name. If your domain name is HDEV and your base config home is c:\psft\cfg, psadmin-plus will look in the path c:\psft\cfg\HDEV\ for your domains.

Shell Versions

If you prefer the older shell script version of psadmin-plus, don’t worry. We saved those versions into branched on the on GitHub repository. You still use the shell scripts but we’ll only be adding new features to the RubyGems version of psadmin-plus.

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