Play Publish

Scripts and guides to automatically build and publish a Play application binaries on a Linux server

I used these bash scripts to publish a Play application in a single step. Before we can use the one-step publish script we have to prepare the server and development machines.

The scripts and commands are written and tested against Ubuntu 14.04

Server Side

Before everything we need the following packages to be installed on server side:

• git
• JRE 6+ (8+ is required if you use Play 2.4+)

Copying the files

You need to copy the following files to the server:

• addwebapp
• play-init-script
• rmwebapp

Make sure that addwebapp and play-init-script are in the same directory.

You will run the following commands in the path you copied the files.

Setting Up a New Web App

Connect to your server using ssh and run the following command in the path you copied the files (where [your-app-name] is the name of your application):

./addwebapp [your-app-name]

This command will setup a bare repository for binaries and create some folders as publish destination which is cloned from the bare repository.

You are ready to go!

Change Application Server Port

Sometimes you deploy more than one application on a server. In this case you have to use different port numbers for each application.

Default port number is 9000 but you can change it in /etc/init.d/play-[your-app-name]. Open the file for edit and change the following line (where [port-no] is the port number):

APP_ARGS="-Dhttp.port=[port-no]"

Remove Web App (Optional)

You can remove the previously setup web app by copying rmwebapp file to the server and running the following command:

./rmwebapp [your-app-name]

Development Side

To be able to publish the binaries to the server you have to setup the publish script on your development machine.

Copy and Update Publish Script

Put the publish script file into your Play application source folder (where app folder leaves) and set the following variables:

APP_NAME="[app-name]"       # The application name you gave in the previous steps
REMOTE_HOST="[ip or host]"  # SSH IP or host name
REMOTE_PORT="22"            # SSH Port number
REMOTE_USER="[user]"        # SSH user name

Make sure the specified user has the shell access without password. You can use ssh-copy-id command to obtain this.

Publish

There you go!

You can publish your Play application by running the publish script:

./publish

Enjoy ;)