Activate and deactivate blades

Platform blades can be active or inactive. Here’s how to change the active/inactive state of a blade, and a note about managing the states of mutually exclusive blades.

In the following steps you’ll be using the dfw command of the Deployment Framework. Before entering any dfw command as ./dfw <command-name>, make sure your current (working) directory is set to the Deployment Framework’s topmost directory.

For a list of dfw commands, click here.

Activating a blade

  • To make inactive blades active on the server machines where they are deployed, on each server enter the command

    ./dfw activate <blade-name-1> <blade-name-2> <blade-name-3> ...

    For example, to activate the Deployment Framework’s built-in Config blades HTTPS and LiberatorWebsite, enter ./dfw activate HTTPS LiberatorWebsite

Any resulting configuration changes don’t take effect until you restart the Deployment Framework on each of the server-machines where the blades are deployed.

Deactivating a blade

  • To make active blades inactive on the server machines where they are deployed, on each server enter the command

    ./dfw deactivate <blade-name-1> <blade-name-2> <blade-name-3> ...

    For example, to deactivate the Deployment Framework’s built-in Config blades HTTPS and MinimalLiberatorWebsite, enter ./dfw deactivate HTTPS MinimalLiberatorWebsite

Any resulting configuration changes don’t take effect until you restart the Deployment Framework on each of the server-machines where the blades are deployed.

Managing mutually exclusive blades

Some blades are mutually exclusive because they provide different versions of the same feature, so you should only make one of them active at a time.

For example, these pairs of Config blades that are built into the Deployment Framework are mutually exclusive:

  • OpenPermissioning and Permissioning

  • LiberatorWebsite and MinimalLiberatorWebsite

If you do activate two mutually exclusive built-in blades, the activate command reports the clash, and you won’t be able to start the Framework.
You can can manage the compatibility of Platform blades that you write by adding entries to the blade control file.

See also: