Payara hosting, the GlassFish upgrade path

Payara Server and GlassFish

Payara Server is built on the Eclipse GlassFish source. It tracks the Jakarta EE specifications closely and adds production features such as clustering, monitoring and a maintained release train. Applications written for GlassFish usually move to Payara with few changes, because the administration model, asadmin and the domain layout are the same.

Versions

• Payara 7 implements Jakarta EE 11. We run it on Java 21.
• Payara 6 implements Jakarta EE 10 and runs on Java 11, 17 or 21.

Tell us which one you need when you subscribe. By default we install Payara 7.

What we set up

• Payara Server Full as a systemd service under its own user.
• The JVM heap sized to your server, replacing the default flags in the domain.
• Nginx with free SSL in front, listeners bound to localhost.
• The admin console on port 4848 reachable only through an SSH tunnel.
• deploy-app app.war to deploy your application to the root of the domain.

Memory

Payara is a full application server. Plan for 4 GB as a minimum for production, and 8 GB if a database shares the server. See how much RAM a Java app needs.

Moving from GlassFish

Oracle GlassFish is no longer the reference path for new Jakarta EE releases. Check your descriptors, glassfish-web.xml settings and JDBC resources, then deploy. If your application still uses javax packages, use Payara 5 compatible code or migrate to jakarta before moving to Payara 6 or 7. Managed plans include help with one migration.