Introduction to Registry

A registry is a content store and a metadata repository. Various SOA artifacts such as services, WSDLs and configuration files can be stored in a registry, keyed by unique paths. A path is similar to a Unix file path. In WSO2 products, all configurations pertaining to modules, logging, security, data sources and other service groups are stored in the registry by default.

The Registry kernel of WSO2 Carbon provides the basic registry and repository functionality. Products based on Carbon use the services provided by the Registry kernel to establish their own registry space, which is utilized for storing data and persisting configuration. Here are some of the features provided by the WSO2 Registry interface:

• Provides the facility to organize resources into collections.
• Keeps multiple versions of resources.
• Manages social aspects such as rating of resources.
• AtomPub interfaces to publish, view and manage resources from remote or non-Java clients.

The Registry space provided to each Carbon product contains three major partitions.

• Local Data Repository - Used to store settings/metadata specific to the product. This registry is not intended to be shared among multiple servers.
• Configuration Registry - Used to store product-specific configurations. These configurations can be shared across multiple instances of the same product like a cluster.
• Governance Registry - Used to store user-specified metadata and resources and can be shared across an organization.

These registry instances are mounted to a single top level registry to provide a single, unified view. Mount points of the three registries are /_system/local, /_system/config and /_system/governance respectively. One could browse the contents of the registry used by the Carbon product through its management console.