Creating a startup script for your play program

I am running a play server on Ubuntu 12.10.  I wanted to create a simple start/stop script in the /etc/init.d folder for it.

Here are the steps I took to accomplish this.

Difference between run, start, and stage

I am still new to the Scala Play Framework so bare with me.  I still do not have it fully in my mind yet, but I will tell you what I do understand.  I gleamed a lot of this information from Plays own documentation at http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/Production  [1]

Run

Using run to start your play program is meant for development. 

Here are some examples of using the run command.

> play ~run

Or

> play run

Run is only meant for dev as a complete check is handled by sbt.

As a side note…

The "~" before a command will trigger the command when files are updated.    So ~run will reload every time a source file is changed.

Start

From the Play documentation

 Play forks a new JVM and runs the default Netty HTTP server

> play start

Stage

From the documentation

You can use the stage task to prepare your application to be run in place

You can compile the program, which creates .jar files and removes the need for the compiled code to rely on Scala in any way.  This also speeds up the initialization of your play server.

To do this run

> play clean compile stage

This creates packages the jar files you need and creates a start script in the newly created target folder.

To run the script issue the following command

> target/start

My current plan is to compile the server with its start script then deploy it to my server and use a script in the /etc/init.d folder to start/stop the play server.

If you look in target/staged you should see the compiled jar files the start script relies on

> ls -alh target/staged/

Create the /etc/init.d

I am creating a start/stop script for my play server at /etc/init.d/play-server.

Open the file for editing

> sudo vi /etc/init.d/play-server

And place the following into it

#!/bin/bash APPLICATION_PATH=/www/play start() {     echo -n "Starting"     sudo start-stop-daemon --start --background --pidfile ${APPLICATION_PATH}/RUNNING_PID -d ${APPLICATION_PATH} --exec target/start -- -Dhttp.port=4200     RETVAL=$?     if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then         echo " - Success"     else         echo " - Failure"     fi     echo } stop() {     echo -n "Stopping"     sudo start-stop-daemon --stop --pidfile ${APPLICATION_PATH}/RUNNING_PID     RETVAL=$?     if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then         echo " - Success"     else         echo " - Failure"     fi     echo }   case "$1" in     start)       start   ;;     stop)       stop   ;;     restart)       stop       start   ;;     *)       echo "Usage: play-server {start|stop|restart}"       exit 1   ;; esac exit $RETVAL

Update its permissions

> sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/play-server

Then from the command line you can run

> sudo /etc/init.d/play-server start

To stop it run

> sudo /etc/init.d/play-server stop

To make it start on a server reboot run the following command

> sudo update-rc.d play-server defaults

Reboot the server to test it

> sudo reboot now

References

[1]        Starting your application in production mode      

            http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/Production

                Accessed 06/2013