In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for supporting deployment in an application server environment. A resource, for example an application or library, can be deployed to different resource groups in different partitions in a domain, to a resource group template referenced by the different resource groups, or to a domain-level resource group. One or more additional deployment operations can be performed on a deployed resource by a partition administrator or a system administrator. A deployment API can be provided to enable a plurality of deployment clients to perform the deployment operations, and can be used to derive partition information and target information for the deployment operations when the information is not provided by a partition administrator. Different deployment scopes are defined to allow a same resource to be deployed in different partitions of a domain and outside any partition in the domain.