The cics-deploy plug-in extends the Zowe command line interface (CLI) to deploy applications developed on a workstation to IBM® CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® (CICS). The Zowe CLI and plug-ins provide a simple and streamlined way to interact with IBM z/OS.

The cics-deploy plug-in provides a CICS deployment workflow for developers and CI/CD automation pipelines similar to that experienced when deploying applications to cloud environments.

Before you start, and especially if you are not familiar with the world of z/OS, Zowe, and CICS, it’s a good idea to read about some of the key concepts, which include Zowe, Zowe CLI profiles and CICS bundles. If you’re keen to get going quickly, you can jump right in and follow along with our tutorial on Deploying a Node.js application.

When everything is installed and you have created the Zowe CLI profiles, you can deploy an application from your workstation to CICS in two steps:

  1. Use the zowe cics-deploy generate bundle command to generate some metadata and artifacts that help the target CICS system understand your application.

  2. Use the zowe cics-deploy push bundle command to push the generated bundle to one or more regions within a CICSplex, enabling and deploying it as an executing application.

Should you need it, and if you understand a little more about CICS, further commands like zowe cics-deploy deploy bundle and zowe cics-deploy undeploy bundle offer you finer-grained control of the process - for example, to enable you to install a bundle in subsets of CICS regions in a cluster in such a way as to maintain an application’s availability for clients.

If you hit any speed bumps on your journey, check out our Troubleshooting pages.