How to auto-deploy Play Framework (2.4) application locally with Jenkins?

Question

How can I auto-deploy Play Framework (2.4) application with Jenkins locally on the same server Jenkins is running? At some point we're going to set up a proper production environment separately and will probably implement test environment(s) in the same way but at this point I'd like to check out whether it is possible to set up a simple test environment to the same server Jenkins is running.

I have a Jenkins job running tests and it seems to work OK. Basically "Execute shell" running activator commands (that could be combined to one line).

./activator clean
./activator test

With Play 1 I've used play start & play stop for similar things. Trying activator start on my dev env, I get the message:

The start command is deprecated, and will be removed in a future version of Play.
To run Play in production mode, run 'stage' instead, and then execute the generated start script in target/universal/stage/bin.
To test your application using production mode, run 'testProd' instead.

So I evaluated two (incomplete) alternatives with "Execute shell" & stage:

Stage & run with nohup:

./activator clean
./activator stage
nohup target/universal/stage/bin/my-app -Dplay.evolutions.db.default.autoApply=true

-> application started OK but the Jenkins task did not stop.

Stage & run with nohup on background:

./activator clean
./activator stage
nohup target/universal/stage/bin/my-app -Dplay.evolutions.db.default.autoApply=true &

-> application seems to have started to some point but did not keep on running?

What would be the preferred (or even only working) way here?

Answer 1

For the particular case I ended up using Docker:

• Installed Docker to the server
• Created a Dockerfile based on play-docker-ci
• Configured Jenkins to
  • build Docker image
  • stop existing container if running, remove existing container if exists
  • run Docker image

and this seems to work pretty nicely so far.

Answer 2

Jenkins kills all its child processes when build finishes to avoid memory leaks, thus there is no app running. The easiest way to setup jenkins with Playframework 2.4 is to use sbt tasks and sbt plugin. If you want to perform a release from jenkins, the best way would be to build debian package and install it using jenkins shell - no process would be killed. See release plugin.

Answer 3

I set this up by having Team City generate a startup.sh script that contains the command to start up the Play server as a background process:

nohup /pathToApp/bin/app_name -Dhttp.port=8180 &

Then the next build step just runs this shell script and starts it up. The nohup and & make this run as a background process and when the build server disconnects it will keep running. I cut out a lot of extra stuff from the startup script for clarity sake, but you can just add whatever startup parameters you want to use for your application.