CloudFoundry Maven Buildpack

A build pack for CloudFoundry that uses Maven.

This is an experimental build pack for CloudFoundry that uses Maven. This is different from the standard Java build pack which requires you to build your code locally and upload the compiled bits. With this build pack your source code is uploaded and built in the CloudFoundry staging environment. After being built, the staged application files will be run by executing a Maven command (like mvn tomcat7:run).

Instructions

Here are the minimal instructions for using this build pack.

Create a Java / Maven project
Build & Test your application locally with Maven
Run mvn clean.
Run cf push --buildpack=https://github.com/dmikusa-pivotal/cf-maven-buildpack.git from the root of your project folder. Alternatively, use "--path" to specify the root of your project.
Your application should start and be running on CloudFoundry.

Examples

Here are two example projects that work with the Maven build pack.

Behind the Scenes

At this point your application has been deployed to CloudFoundry. This section describes what happened and how you can alter that default behavior.

First, everything in your application's project folder (or whatever you specified with --path) will be uploaded to CloudFoundry. You can control what is uploaded by adding a .cfignore file (same syntax as .gitignore) and specifing files and folders that should not get uploaded. Minimally, I would suggest adding the target folder to that list since it would be a waste of bandwidth to upload this folder.

After the upload completes, the build pack will download and install Java and Maven. It has default versions, which you can see here. You can change the versions by setting different JAVA_PACKAGE, JAVA_PACKAGE_HASH, MAVEN_PACKAGE and / or MAVEN_PACKAGE_HASH tags in your project configuration.

At this point, the build pack will execute mvn test which should compile and test your application in the CloudFoundry staging environment (Note, if you have long tests you may want to run a different command, staging needs to complete in under 900 seconds). If you want to change the command that is run add the MAVEN_BUILD_COMMAND tag into your project configuration and specify a different command to execute.

If your Maven command executes successfully, the build pack will wrap up by doing these two steps.

Copy the Maven local repository into the droplet. This is done to speed up the initial execution of your application when your application is run.
Create a start script that CloudFoundry will call when the droplet is executed. By default, the start script is simple. It sets JAVA_HOME, M2_HOME and calls mvn tomcat7:run to start your application. You can specify a different command by setting MAVEN_RUN_COMMAND in your project configuration file.

Configuration

In the previous section, I mentioned project specific configuration. Each project can create it's own configuration file which will override the default settings provided by the build pack. This is done by creating a config/options.json file in your project folder and populating that file.

Maven Notes

The build pack should work with most pom.xml files, with only minor modifications. Here are the adjustments that need to be made for the default configuration, which uses tomcat7:run to start your application. This would vary slightly if you are going to use another command to run your application, like jetty:run. The key take away is that you want to make sure that the container started by Maven is listening on the VCAP_APP_PORT, which is done in step #3 below.

In the <properties> block, add a property tomcat.version. Set this to the current version of Tomcat.

<properties>
    ...
    <tomcat.version>7.0.42</tomcat.version>
    ...
</properties>

Under <pluginManagement> -> <plugins>, add a <plugin> tag for ```tomcat-7-maven-plugin. In here we'll specify the dependencies for the plugin and set the version to what was defined in step #1.

  <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
          <plugin>
              <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
              <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
              <version>2.1</version>
              <dependencies>
                  <dependency>
                    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-embed-core</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-util</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-coyote</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-api</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-jdbc</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-dbcp</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-servlet-api</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-jsp-api</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-jasper</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-jasper-el</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-el-api</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-catalina</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-tribes</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-catalina-ha</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-annotations-api</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-juli</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>

                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-embed-logging-juli</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>
                    <dependency>
                      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
                      <artifactId>tomcat-embed-logging-log4j</artifactId>
                      <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
                    </dependency>
             </dependencies>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</pluginManagement>

Under <plugins> add a <plugin> for tomcat7-maven-plugin. This sets the version of the plugin and is required to set the context path to / and the port to ${env.VCAP_APP_PORT}.

 <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <port>${env.VCAP_APP_PORT}</port>
        <path>/</path>
    </configuration>
 </plugin>

Development

The build pack is broken down into the following parts:

The bash scripts that implement the build pack interface. These bootstrap and delegate to the Python scripts of the same name.
The Python scripts that define the steps the build pack takes prepare the application. These use the build_pack_utils library which performs the heavy lifting.
The configuration which defines the details about what is installed. Configuration options can be overridden by the end user.