Deploying Lift applications on OpenShift

Having released the first milestone of Lift's integration into Escalante a short while back, we turned our heads to getting more people to deploying Lift applications on top of Escalante.

So, I'm very proud to announce that you can now run Lift applications on Red Hat's OpenShift cloud. OpenShift is Red Hat's free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. As an application platform in the cloud, OpenShift manages the stack so you can focus on your code.

For Lift users this means that you can now deploy your Lift applications on OpenShift, and let it manage the stack for you which behind the scenes will run on top of Escalante.

Deploying your first Lift app on OpenShift

1. First of all, sign up for OpenShift and follow the instructions in the Getting Started guide to set up SSH keys, command line tools...etc.

2. Once you've signed up, log in, go to My Applications and create a brand new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.0 application.

3. Give the application a name, for example escalante, and click on Create Application button.

4. Once you've installed Git locally, clone the application following the instructions on OpenShift, i.e:

     $ git clone \
        ssh://[USER_ID]@escalante-[YOUR_DOMAIN].rhcloud.com/~/git/escalante.git/
     $ cd escalante/
   

5. Get rid of the default sample application and commit it:

     $ git rm -r pom.xml src
     $ git commit -m "Remove default app"
   

6. From the root of the local copy of the application, merge in the modules and server configuration needed to run Escalante on top of JBoss EAP. The merged files will be stored under the .openshift folder:

     $ git remote add escalante -m master \
         git://github.com/escalante/escalante-openshift.git
     $ git pull -s recursive -X theirs escalante master
   

7. To help users get started with Escalante, we've developed some quickstarts out of which we'll be demostrating how Hello World Lift application runs on OpenShift. So, merge in the Escalante quickstarts:

     $ git remote add quickstart -m master \
         git://github.com/escalante/escalante-quickstart.git
     $ git pull -s recursive -X theirs quickstart master
   

8. You now have all you need to run the Hello World Lift Escalante quickstart on OpenShift. To run it, you need to push the changes in your local repository. By pushing the changes, OpenShift will build the application and deploy it, so might take a little while. Execute:

     $ git push
   

9. Once the push finishes access the application via: http://escalante-[YOUR_DOMAIN].rhcloud.com/ and you should see something like this:

   

Run alternative quickstarts: The quickstarts repository you merged in contains several applications that can run on top of Escalante. Check the Escalante Quickstarts documentation for detailed information on these examples. You can alternatively enable other applications, such as the `persistence-lift` quickstart. To do so, modify the root `pom.xml` file and select which quickstart to build:

Future Work

Deploying Lift applications to OpenShift this way is a bit arduous, which is why we're also working on producing an OpenShift cartdridge designed specifically for Lift applications that can run on top of Escalante, which would simplify the process significantly. Watch this space!

Get in touch!

If you have any questions, issues, or other feedback about Escalante, you can find us on #escalante on freenode or our public forums.