How to deploy a Play 2.0 app on Debian?

Question

I have play application, to make it easy to deploy on Debian, What are the ways to

1. Create a daemon out of the code, with a standard init.d script, the main problem here how to gracefully stop the application?

2. How can I compile the code as a fat jar, easy to maintain 1 single file compared to multiple files and directories (the standard way of deploying a Play app).

Answer 1

1. assuming you are using the "play dist" package, you could create a simple init.d script around it. Something like:

/etc/init.d/play.myplayapp

    #! /bin/sh

    ### BEGIN INIT INFO
    # Provides:          play
    # Required-Start:    $all
    # Required-Stop:     $all
    # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
    # Default-Stop:      0 1 6
    # Short-Description:
    # Description:
    ### END INIT INFO

    APP="myplayapp"
    APP_PATH="/opt/play/$APP"

    start() {
        $APP_PATH/start &
    }

    stop() {
        kill `cat $APP_PATH/RUNNING_PID`
    }

    case "$1" in
      start)
        echo "Starting $APP"
        start
        echo "$APP started."
        ;;
      stop)
        echo "Stopping $APP"
        stop
        echo "$APP stopped."
        ;;
      restart)
        echo  "Restarting $APP."
        stop
        sleep 2
        start
        echo "$APP restarted."
        ;;
      *)
        N=/etc/init.d/play.$APP
        echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
    esac

    exit 0

2. They don't really have a single file distribution of projects. The best you can do is running "play dist" to generate a distributable package. Even if it was distributed as a single file, it would probably be extracted to the file system at runtime just for efficiency (just how war files are handled).