In that context, in the last few months I had inquiries from some users asking where they could find the original WLST that works with WebLogic 8.1 and 7.0, also WLST Script Generator and Console extension that work with WebLogic 9.x.

Now you can get these from the new google code project wlst-modules. WLST Script Generator 9.x can be downloaded from here. The zip contains a ReadMe.html that should walk you through the configurations steps. And for those unfortunate souls who are still using WebLogic 7.0 and 8.1, WLST jar can be downloaded from here.

*sys-package-mgr*: can’t create package cache dir, ‘/tmp/cachedir/packages’
Traceback (innermost last):
File “<iostream>”, line 12, in ?
ImportError: no module named java

When Jython initializes it scans all the jar files it can find at startup to build the package and class structure available to the JVM. This information is written to files in a directory named ‘cachedir’, WLST chooses your ‘java.io.tmpdir’ to store these files. There is a problem with this approach especially on Unix machines.

Problem:

Most Unix machines are shared across a number of users. Say “user1″ first logs into the machine and fired up ‘java weblogic.WLST’, Jython will create the ‘cachedir’ under ‘/var/tmp/’ and this directory will be owned by ‘user1′. This user will have no problems using WLST. Now ‘user2′ logs in and fires up WLST, this process will try to write to the same directory, ‘/var/tmp/cachedir’ which is now owned by ‘user1′ and hence fails with the above error message.

Solution:

There is a pretty simple and straight forward solution to this problem. Jython supports a System property (python.cachedir) that you can set which will determine the directory where this ‘cachedir’ is created. So in our case to start WLST you will use,

java -Dpython.cachedir=/home/user1 weblogic.WLST

This will create the cachedir under /home/user1, and this way all users can have their own cachedir’s without running into each other. For a more elegant solution you can create a simple unix script that wraps the call to WLST and adding the right cachedir location per user. Sample is shown below,

#!/bin/sh

# Setup classpath, probably execute setDomainEnv.sh

java -Dpython.cachedir=~ weblogic.WLST

As long as the ‘~’ resolves properly to the home directory for the user executing WLST you will never have to worry about this ‘cachedir’ related error messages..