Play-ing with Cloud Foundry v2

17 Jun, 2013

I'm currently messing about a bit with Cloud Foundry, an open-source Platform-as-a-Service which promises to be something akin to Heroku-in-your-data-center, or perhaps Heroku-in-your-AWS-VPC. In any case, it's exciting stuff, and appears to be moving fast, under the guidance of Pivotal.

Brian McClain posted an article recently about getting a Haskell app running in Cloud Foundry. I decided to do something similar using Play.

I hadn't used Play before, but it turns out that it's pretty easy to get a basic app up and running: 

$ play new playpen

A quick check locally, to check that everything is hanging together: 

$ cd playpen
$ play start
$ open http://localhost:9000

All good, so I'll try pushing it up to Cloud Foundry. 

$ cf push
Name> playpen

Instances> 1

1: 64M
2: 128M
3: 256M
4: 512M
Memory Limit> 256M

Creating playpen... OK

1: playpen
2: none
Subdomain> playpen

1: cfapps.io
2: none
Domain> cfapps.io

Binding playpen.cfapps.io to playpen... OK

Create services for application?> n

Bind other services to application?> n

Save configuration?> y

Saving to manifest.yml... OK
Uploading playpen... OK
Starting playpen... OK
-----> Downloaded app package (1020K)
Installing java.
Downloading JDK...
Copying openjdk-1.7.0_21.tar.gz from the buildpack cache ...
Unpacking JDK to .jdk
/var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/buildpack.rb:63:in `start_command': Please specify a web start command in your manifest.yml or Procfile (RuntimeError)
  from (erb):6:in `generate_startup_script'
  from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/erb.rb:838:in `eval'
  from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/erb.rb:838:in `result'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/staging_plugin.rb:110:in `generate_startup_script'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/buildpack.rb:84:in `startup_script'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/staging_plugin.rb:139:in `block in create_startup_script'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/staging_plugin.rb:138:in `open'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/staging_plugin.rb:138:in `create_startup_script'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/buildpack.rb:19:in `block in stage_application'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/buildpack.rb:12:in `chdir'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/lib/buildpack.rb:12:in `stage_application'
  from /var/vcap/packages/dea_next/buildpacks/bin/run:10:in `<main>'
Checking playpen...
Application failed to stage

Well, that started well, but finished badly. Cloud Foundry is assumed I was pushing a generic Java app. We need to tell it how to handle Play applications.

Buildpacks to the rescue! Buildpacks are a concept that Cloud Foundry has borrowed from Heroku - they adapt the generic PaaS to the specfics of a particular application framework and/or language. A buildpack takes your application source-code as input, and outputs a compiled package that can be run on the target PaaS. Some buildpacks are very specific to the app framework; others are more generic, and can support multiple frameworks.

It turns out that the buildpack required for a Play 2.1.1 app is heroku-buildpack-scala. This was written for Heroku, but can be used without changes on Cloud Foundry! 

$ cf push --buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-scala.git
Using manifest file manifest.yml

Not applying manifest changes without --reset
See `cf diff` for more details.

Uploading playpen... OK
Changes:
  buildpack: '' -> 'https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-scala.git'
Updating playpen... OK
Stopping playpen... OK

Starting playpen... OK
-----> Downloaded app package (1020K)
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/buildpacks/heroku-buildpack-scala.git/.git/
Installing heroku-buildpack-scala.git.
-----> Installing OpenJDK 1.6...done
-----> Building app with sbt
-----> Running: sbt clean compile stage
       Getting net.java.dev.jna jna 3.2.3 ...
       Getting org.scala-sbt sbt 0.12.2 ...
(... etc etc ... download half the internet ...)
       [success] Total time: 3 s, completed Jun 17, 2013 5:39:55 AM
-----> Dropping ivy cache from the slug
-----> Uploading staged droplet (127M)
-----> Uploaded droplet
Checking playpen...
Staging in progress...
  0/1 instances: 1 starting
  1/1 instances: 1 running
OK

Success! That's one more toy application in the cloud!

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