Marcin Swierczynski's blog

The purpose of this article is to show how quickly and easily deploy Grails application to Cloud Foundry platform.

What is Cloud Foundry?

From cloudfoundry.com:

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware, with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances, including CloudFoundry.com.

Prerequisites

To make a use of this article you’ll need to have Grails framework installed.

To check if Grails is properly installed, use

grails -version

You should see something like

Grails version: 2.0.0

If you haven’t, just follow the Grails Getting Started Guide.

Let’s the fun begin

The whole process is extraordinary simple! Just do the following steps.

1. Create Grails app

   grails create-app cloud_foundry_example
   

2. Change your working directory to a new application directory

   cd cloud_foundry_example
   

3. Install Cloud Foundry plug-in

   grails install-plugin cloud-foundry
   

4. Configure your Cloud Foundry credentials

   You can configure it in both grails-app/conf/Config.groovy and in ~/.grails/settings.groovy. Since the file will contain sensitive, it’s not recommended to put it in source control. That’s why the second option is considered the best practice.

   So, configure your credentials using

   grails.plugin.cloudfoundry.username = "<your_username>"
   grails.plugin.cloudfoundry.password = "<pass>"
   

5. Test your config

   grails cf-info
   

   The output should look like

   VMware's Cloud Application Platform
   For support visit http://support.cloudfoundry.com
   Target:   http://api.cloudfoundry.com (v0.999)
   
   User:     <your_username>
   Usage:    Memory   (0B of 2.0G total)
             Services (0 of 16 total)
             Apps     (0 of 20 total)
   

6. Deploy your app!

   grails prod cf-push
   

   You’ll be asked about the application URL, and also about some persistence services (in the time of writing: MySQL and PostgreSQL). I advise to accept default address and chose one of these services.

   If you want to re-deploy after some changes, just do

   grails prod cf-update
   

That’s it!

The app is deployed and ready to work. A proof? PartyPlanner app.

In next part I’ll describe how to configure different services in Cloud Foundry.