How to deploy a Grails 3 app to AWS Beanstalk and CloudFront CDN

After sharing our initial experience on How to publish your Grails 3 plugin to Bintray few month ago, here is a quick guide on how we deploy our Grails 3 app to AWS Beanstalk with Gradle and Travis, a great combination of our weapons of choice.

Note: this is a follow up article to my 2014 Gr8Conf talk (Running a lean startup) and corresponding article (Running a Startup with Lean & DevOps culture), which was based on Grails 2.

On the Grails side

First step: we need a Grails 3 app.

• run grails create-app my-app (or use an existing app),
• edit grails-app/conf/application.yml to use in memory DB (to be replaced by our RDS config later)

production:
  dataSource:
    dbCreate: update
    url: jdbc:h2:mem:testDb;MVCC=TRUE;LOCK_TIMEOUT=10000;DB_CLOSE_ON_EXIT=FALSE

• run grails war or gradle assemble to generate the artefact to deploy.

On the AWS side

Next step: let’s deploy manually our Grails 3 app.

• signup/signin to https://console.aws.amazon.com,
• go to Elastic Beanstalk and create an app called MyApp,

• select Create web server to generate your first environment,
• select Tomcat prefigured configuration,
• select your own source and pick up you war file (my-app/build/libs/my-app-0.1.war)

• enter environment information and unique URL,

• and continue with the different settings for you environment (instance type, EC2 key pair, ), you can keep most of them by default,
• once your ready, Launch your environment and wait for the magic of Beanstalk to happen…

Groovy !
Your Grails 3 app is running in AWS Cloud.

Now let’s automate the deployment by using the awesome Beanstalk Gradle plugin (https://github.com/EvidentSolutions/gradle-beanstalk-plugin).

On the Gradle side

• in your Grails app, edit build.gradle to add Beanstalk Gradle plugin,

plugins {
    ...
    id "fi.evident.beanstalk" version "0.0.6"
}

• add the corresponding configuration (after the apply plugin section),

beanstalk {
    s3Endpoint = "s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"
    beanstalkEndpoint = "elasticbeanstalk.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"
    deployments {
        // Example to deploy to the same env
        beta {
            war = tasks.war
            application = 'MyApp'
            environment = 'beta'
        }
    }
}

• for user credentials, set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables (deployment user must have the required role/permissions for beanstalk, see AWS doc: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/AWSHowTo.iam.roles.aeb.html),
• to deploy your app to the beta env, simply run gradle deployBeta.

With these settings, it will re-deploy to the same environment (which is usually fine for a beta/staging env).

If you run on more than 1 instance in production, Beanstalk will perform batch deployment (default to 30% of your fleet at a time) in order to get zero-downtime deployment.

Another option is to perform blue/green deployment for production, simply define an environment name based on your project version : the Beanstalk Gradle plugin will create a new environment for each release of your app. Then use “swap environment URLs” to perform zero-downtime deployment.

deployments {
    // Example to create a new env for each version
    production {
        war = tasks.war
        application = 'MyApp'
        environment = "my-app-${project.version.replaceAll('\\.', '-')}"
       // Saved configuration name to use to create each env
       template = 'default' 
    }
}

• now, to deploy your app with a new production env, simply run gradle deployProduction.

On the Travis side

Last step to build our deployment pipeline: configuring Travis to run our gradle task after a git commit.

• create a beta deployment branch with the following .travis.yml file (to define environement variables for AWS credentials, see Travis doc: http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/environment-variables/),

language: groovy
jdk: oraclejdk8
sudo: false # To use new Travis docker-based infrastructure
branches:
  only:
    - beta
env:
  global:
     # $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
     - secure: "..."
     # $AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
     - secure: "..."
script:
  - gradle deployBeta

• configure Travis integration with your GitHub repo,
• to automatically deploy your app, merge you develop branch to beta branch and push your commit!

BONUS — Static assets deployment to CloudFront CDN

Let’s add an extra step to our deployment pipeline: static assets upload to an S3 bucket (used as an origin for CloudFront CDN) with the Asset Pipeline CDN Gradle plugin, my first Gradle plugin ;)(https://github.com/agorapulse/gradle-asset-pipeline-cdn).

• in your Grails app, edit build.gradle to add Asset Pipeline CDN Gradle plugin,

plugins {
    ...
    id "agorapulse.plugins.asset-pipeline-cdn" version "0.1.1"
}

• add the corresponding configuration (after the apply plugin section),

assetsCdn {
    accessKey = System.getenv('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID')
    secretKey = System.getenv('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')
    region = 'eu-west-1'
    directory = 'my-bucket'
    storagePath = "assets/${project.name}-${project.version}/"
    expires = 365 // Expires in 1 year (value in days)
    gzip = true
}

• edit ./grails-app/conf/application.groovy to enable CDN-based hosting of your static assets in your production environment,

// Asset pipeline CDN assets
environments {
    production {
        // Put your CloudFront URL (or S3 bucket URL if you don't use CloudFront CDN)
        grails.assets.url = "https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/my-bucket/assets/${appName}-${appVersion}/"
    }
}

• upload/sync your assets to your S3 bucket by running gradle uploadAssets,

• And/or edit your .travis.yml,

...
script:
  - gradle uploadAssets deployBeta

Et voila!
You can now deploy your Grails 3 app to AWS Beanstalk and CloudFront CDN, with a single git commit.

Note: we’re hiring! Are you kick-ass fullstack or front-end dev that want to work on Angular 2, Java or Groovy? You must contact me to join our dream team in Paris!

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