A practical path to installing Liberty and z/OS Connect servers – 7 adding apis and services

Introduction

I’ll cover the instructions to install z/OS Connect, but the instructions are similar for other products. The steps are to create the minimum server configuration and gradually add more function to it.

The steps below guide you through

1. Overview
2. planning to help you decide what you need to create, and what options you have to choose
3. initial customisation and creating a server,  creating defaults and creating function specific configuration files,  for example a file for SAF
4. starting the server
5. enable logon security and add SAF definitions
6. add keystores for TLS, and client authentication
7. adding an API and service application
8. protecting the API and service applications
9. collecting monitoring data including SMF
10. use the MQ sample
11. using WLM to classify a service

With each step there are instructions on how to check the work has been successful.

Adding APIs and Services

For services you have to include a feature. For example with mq you need

 <feature>zosconnect:mqService-1.0</feature>

These are listed here.   You need the CICS service to be able to use CICS applications etc.

You also need to copy the files application (*.aar) files into the apis directory, and the service(*.sar) files into the services directory.

There are several ways of doing this.

You can do this with the uss cp command. The command below copies an MQ one – you can use others

Find what applications and services are available

find  /usr/lpp/IBM/zosconnect/v3r0beta/runtime/* -name *.aar
find  /usr/lpp/IBM/zosconnect/v3r0beta/runtime/* -name *.sar   

copy the files to the servers directory

cp /usr/lpp/IBM/zosconnect/v3r0beta/runtime/templates/servers
  /sampleMqStockManager/resources/zosconnect/apis/*
  /var/zosc*/ser*/default/re*/z*/ap*                                                                                   
cp /usr/lpp/IBM/zosconnect/v3r0beta/runtime/templates/servers
  /sampleMqStockManager/resources/zosconnect/ser*/* 
  /var/zosc*/ser*/default/re*/z*/se*                                                                                        

Use a REST request or use the zOS explorer.

Once you have done this either restart the server or use the operator command

f ...zcon,refresh

and the application and services should be available

You should get in the message.log on the STDOUT (if you have configured it to print information messages – see earlier posts).

BAQR7000I: z/OS Connect EE API archive file stockmanager installed successfully.
BAQR7043I: z/OS Connect EE service archive stockQuery installed successfully.

Using a web browser, or curl with the URL https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/services gave me

{"zosConnectServices":
  [
    {"ServiceName":"stockQuery",
     "ServiceDescription":"A stock query service based on IBM MQ.",
     "ServiceProvider":"IBM MQ for z/OS",
     "ServiceURL": "https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/services/stockQuery"
      }
  ]
}

URL https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/apis gave me

{"apis":    
  [
    {"name":"stockmanager","version":"1.0.0","description":"",
     "adminUrl":"https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/apis/stockmanager"
     }
   ]
}

You can invoke the service with https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/services/stockQuery and get details of the stockQuery service.

Once it all works…

I played with the curl interface to deploy a service.

• I copied the stockQuery.sar file down to linux in binary
• I could use jar -tvf stockQuery.sar to display the contents
• I used curl –insecure -v –header Content-Type:application/zip -i –cacert cacert.pem –cert adcdd.pem:password –key adcdd.key.pem -X post –data-binary @/home/zPDT/stock2.sar https://10.1.3.10:9443/zosConnect/services
  • Note:  If I used –data-binary “@/home/zPDT/stock2.sar” in quotes I got
    • HTTP/1.1 415 Unsupported Media Type
    • “errorMessage” : “BAQR0418W: An unsupported media type of application/x-www-form-urlencoded was specified.”}
  • because the string was sent up – not the file.  I used the –verbose option to see the number of bytes sent.
  • I also got these messages if the file was not found.  It sends the string instead!