Provisioning a CICS region using z/OS PT

The following steps take you through provisioning a CICS® region from a z/OS® Provisioning Toolkit image. You can then deploy and test applications using the CICS region.

The z/OS Provisioning Toolkit (z/OS PT) provides a command line utility and z/OSMF workflows to provision CICS regions and other development environments on z/OS. This tutorial requires z/OS PT version 1.1.5 or above to be installed on z/OS.

Provision your CICS region using a z/OS PT image

Before you can provision a CICS region, a z/OS PT image needs to be created and built as outlined in Preparing a z/OS PT image. This is typically prepared by a CICS system administrator.

Procedure

Install the Zowe CLI and plug-ins by following the steps in Installing.
Create Zowe CLI profiles by following the steps in Creating Zowe CLI profiles.
On z/OS, update your user .profile file to run z/OS PT.

Add the directory to the zospt command to your PATH.
```
 export PATH=$PATH:zospt_directory/bin
```
Optional: To avoid the password prompt for each zospt command, set environment variable zospt_pw. Ensure others do not have access to read your .profile:
```
 export zospt_pw=
```
Optional: If z/OSMF is configured with domain and tenant names that are not the default as described in Configuring z/OS Provisioning Toolkit, add the following environment variables:
```
 export zospt_domain=
 export zospt_tenant=
```
On your workstation, test you can run z/OS PT.
```
 zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt --help"
```
List the z/OS PT images available for you to use.
```
  zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt images"
```
Provision your CICS region.

Update cics_55_nodejs to the name of the image, and --name to specify a name for the container that is easy to remember for use in later commands. This command may take a few minutes to complete.
```
 zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt run cics_55_nodejs --name my_cics_region"
```

Display your CICS region information.

 zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt inspect my_cics_region"

The output is in JSON format and includes values for the CICS region application ID, and the z/OS directory within which your CICS bundles can be uploaded. For example:

  "DFH_REGION_APPLID": "CICPY000",
  "DFH_REGION_ZFS_DIRECTORY": "/u/cicprov/mnt/CICPY000",

Your application can use the directories and files under the DFH_REGION_ZFS_DIRECTORY path:

DFH_REGION_ZFS_DIRECTORY sub-directory	Usage
JVMProfiles/	JVM server profiles
bundles/	CICS bundles
dfhconfig/	CICS configuration files
dfhconfig/nodejsprofiles/general.profile	General profile containing values for WORK_DIR and NODE_HOME. Node.js application should include this by adding `%INCLUDE=&USSCONFIG;/nodejsprofiles/general.profile` to their CICS Node.js application profile
workdir/	Trace, log and configuration files create by applications, Node.js runtimes, Java runtimes, and CICS runtimes

Update your Zowe CLI cics-deploy profile to deploy to your CICS region by default.

Update --scope to specify the value from DFH_REGION_APPLID, and --target-directory to specify the bundles subdirectory of DFH_REGION_ZFS_DIRECTORY. For example:
```
 zowe profiles update cics-deploy cics --scope CICPY000 --target-directory "/u/cicprov/mnt/CICPY000/bundles"
```

Results

You are now ready to deploy applications to the provisioned CICS region. You can try this out by following the steps in Deploying a Node.js application. During deployment, the CICS bundle will be copied into the bundles/ directory, and output files will be written into a sub-directory of workdir/.

Stop your CICS region

The CICS region, and the applications running in it, can be stopped if you are not going to be using them for a while by using the following command:

zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt stop my_cics_region"

Start your CICS region

The CICS region can be started after it was previously stopped, for example due to the z/OS system being restarted, by using the following command:

zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt start my_cics_region"

Deprovision your CICS region

The CICS region can be stopped and removed completely using the following command. This will remove the DFH_REGION_ZFS_DIRECTORY directory used to upload your application and store application output files.

zowe zos-uss issue ssh "zospt rm -f my_cics_region"

Tags: