How do you deploy a non-web Java app through CloudBees Jenkins "Deploy Now" feature?

Question

With CloudBees now supporting deployment of Java applications, is it possible to use the post-build action in Jenkins "Deploy to CloudBees" to deploy your app? Furthermore, I'd like to use the Maven assembly plugin's jar-with-dependencies goal so that I can simply and automatically deploy my entire app to CloudBees right through Jenkins.

Answer 1

While the current CloudBees deployer Jenkins plugin appears to not support this, in fact it does. Here are the steps that after much trial and error worked for me:

1. Include the jar-with-dependencies maven plugin in your pom.xml. I used the <goal>single</goal> and <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef> described here. That will put an additional jar file in your target folder {artifactId}-{version}-jar-with-dependencies.jar
2. Deploy that jar via the CloudBees API. The last line of this page explains how to do that. Specify your runnable jar, make sure the runtimeContainer=java, and the jar file to be uploaded, and it should deploy. Even though CloudBees says to use a zip file, a jar file works just fine.
3. Once that has been deployed once via the command line, your app ID now "remembers" those settings so that it can be done via Jenkins so long as you're doing the CloudBees Deploy to that same app. In your Jenkins job, add the "Deploy to CloudBees" Post-build action to your configuration. Click "Add Web Application" (strange, I know, since it's not a web-app! CloudBees says they will work to change that...), select First Match (even if it's a Maven project, use First Match), enter your application ID that you deployed your app to in step 2, and then enter the full name of your jar file and try your build again. It should upload your jar file and activate the instance in your CloudBees PaaS. Note that this still hard-codes the version in the jar file - I am working to see how to setup a variable for the version of the jar file so that it corresponds to the Maven build version.