[2.0] Start an application as a background process

[Justin]

Hello, team.

I am wondering how an play 2.0 application starts as a background process.

As you know, the app will remain in background when typing CTRL + D right after typing 'play start'.

But it is not suitable for me because I start my play 2.0 application with a script rather than type 'play start' myself.

More specifically on the script, I use Capistrano.

I have tried to type command like 'nohup play start', but ended up facing Java exception as follows.

[error] java.io.IOException: Bad file descriptor

[error] Use 'last' for the full log.

I can ignore the error log but Capistrano can't. It's because the nohup command exists with an error, which results in 'failed' status of Capistrano.

I am considering deploying the app to many servers, so I can't help but using a deploy tool like Capistrano.

It seems that this problem faces the play developers who should handle many servers.

Give me some advice.

Thanks,

Justin.

[biesior]

It makes no sense to run application in production via console as it eats some resources as well, better prepare standalone application with dist task: http://www.playframework.org/documentation/2.0.1/ProductionDist

Didn't meet any problems with nohup starting dist application yet.

There is also current topic about starting app on Ubuntu, there are some other solutions suggested: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/play-framework/G5Tsu3CF4os

[Justin]

'play start' will make me happier because i need to modify the script to use 'dist' with Capistrano. :)

Anyway, I will keep your tip for the last resolution, biesior.

Thanks.

2012년 5월 10일 목요일 오후 6시 4분 57초 UTC+9, biesior 님의 말:

[Guillaume Bort]

use `play stage` and then run `target/start` instead.

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[Justin]

It did not work, Guillaume.

So I just fix the framework source a little bit.

pull request:

https://github.com/playframework/Play20/pull/295

ticket:

https://play.lighthouseapp.com/projects/82401-play-20/tickets/457-start-an-application-as-background-process

Please review it, Guillaume.

Thanks, 

Justin.

2012년 5월 10일 목요일 오후 6시 50분 39초 UTC+9, Guillaume Bort 님의 말:

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[Guillaume Bort]

Sorry but it works, and it is the proper way of doing it. We are using
this for Heroku deployment (and I use it personally for all my Play
2.0 deployment).

So, again, run:

$ play stage
$ target/start

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[Ben McCann]

I use supervisor to run my Play app and would highly recommend checking it out.

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[Ike]

Hi Ben,

I've seen you mention this a couple of times already and I'm curious about it. Could you share a bit more detail on how you use Supervisor for this? It would be nice to see some sample working code since the site feels very academic to me.

I've been using very simple shell scripts for this and I'm interested in learning how supervisor could improve this.

[Ben McCann]

It's super easy to get it up and running.  You just add a program section like the one below to your supervisord.conf with the command pointing to the start script from "play dist".  Then your app will be brought back up whenever the machine is rebooted or the app crashes, etc.  You can use the supervisorctl command to do things like "supervisorctl restart myapp".  Let me know if you have any other questions.

[program:myapp]

user=myuser

command=/play-dist-directory/start -Dconfig.resource=prod.conf -Dlogger.resource=logger-prod.xml -Dhttp.port=8201

stderr_logfile=/log-directory/stderr.log

stdout_logfile=/log-directory/stdout.log

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[Justin]

Thanks for the quick response, Guillaume.

I have tried again what you explained, but the 'target/start' command did not escape to the shell.

I mean it worked as foreground, not as background, so it did not exit.

In normal cases, it is okay, but with Capistrano, a deployment programe, it is not.

It is because Capistrano scripts wait for commands to be completed.

I have also tried to do 'target/start' with '&' at the end of command like below:

$ nohup target/start &

But it did not work. I suppose that, in Capistrano scripts, executing a command as background with '&' is not allowed.

Please help me on what I was doing wrong and how to solve the problem, Guillaume.

Thanks,

Justin.

2012년 5월 10일 목요일 오후 11시 31분 15초 UTC+9, Guillaume Bort 님의 말:

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[Ben McCann]

Yes, I had the same problem with Fabric for a very long time, which sounds very similar to Capistrano.  You should seriously try supervisor since it's only about 4 lines of configuration :-)

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[Justin]

I will study supervisor. Thanks, Ben.

I forked the source code and added a new feature that accepts an option '-Dbackground=true' for 'play start'. 

https://github.com/kakao/Play20

But, I did not do 'pull request' with this yet.

The tip that Guillaume gave me does not seem to work for Capistrano, so I cannot help but using the forked version for the time being.

Thanks, Ben and Guillaume.

2012년 5월 11일 금요일 오후 2시 24분 19초 UTC+9, Ben McCann 님의 말:

[Marcos Pereira]

Ben, 

Can you also share more information about how to use fabric?

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[Ben McCann]

First I use sbt-goodies's dist-unzip (thanks Peter!) to locally unzip the distribution created by play dist.

The actual Fabric script is pretty easy.  I do a bunch of other stuff that's specific to my project, but here's the important parts.  I rsync the unzipped project to the remote server and then I tell supervisor to restart with the new version.  To run, I just type "fab deploy".

from fabric.api import *

from fabric.contrib.project import rsync_project

def deploy():

  # Transfer the files

  run('mkdir -p {0}'.format(BIN_DIR))

  rsync_project(BIN_DIR, DIST_DIR + '/', delete=True)

  # Run the binaries

  run('supervisorctl restart myproject')

[Jeroen Rosenberg]

Hi Ben,

I've tried controlling my play2 app's lifecycle with supervisor, since I'm also using capistrano for deployment. I've used your sample configuration. It works great for starting the application, but it's not able to stop it properly (although supervisor thinks that it's stopped). Did you achieve this?

Best,

Jeroen

Op donderdag 10 mei 2012 21:36:33 UTC+2 schreef Ben McCann het volgende:

[Ben McCann]

Hi Jeroen,

Stopping works just fine for me.  I do "supervisorctl stop myproject".  I'm using supervisor 3.0a8-1.1 on Ubuntu 12.04.

-Ben

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[Jeroen Rosenberg]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your reply. I couldn't get this to work that easily unfortunately. Meanwhile, I've continued investigating. In the end I wrote a start and stop script and trigger them over ssh manually with capistrano. See my gist https://gist.github.com/2694531

This works, so my problem was with the capistrano 'run' command rather than 'play start'

Best,

J

[dl]

For anyone that needs to do this, here was my solution running under an EC2 instance (Amazon's Gnu/Linux, which I think is RHEL variant):

1. Install supervisord:  sudo easy_install supervisord
   
2. Place the attached supervisord script into /etc/init.d
   
1. sudo chmod +x supervisord
2. sudo chkconfig --add supervisord
3. Create a supervisor.conf file for your application, place it into /etc/supervisor.conf   [Sample attached - the Important thing to notice is that it must launch the java process directly, and cannot use the start command. (If you want to know why, see the supervisord docs about daemon processes)]
4. Now you can control your play application using:  supervisorctl start|stop|restart|status myapp
5. If you want this to start automatically at bootup, modify the runlevel using:
1. chkcontrol --level 2345 supervisord

I have no idea how to do this on other distros to please dont ask.  Hopefully this will save someone some time.

-Dan

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[Seyun Choi]

Oh, I just changed the deploying way to using 'play stage'.

Put it roughly,

1. 'play stage' at my local computer.

2. Push the 'target' directory to the version control system.

3. Deploy the staged files from the version control system then restart the application.

If you have further question, let me know. :)

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 5:19 PM, Sven Johansson <johanss...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:22:47 AM UTC+2, Justin wrote:

I forked the source code and added a new feature that accepts an option '-Dbackground=true' for 'play start'. 

https://github.com/kakao/Play20

But, I did not do 'pull request' with this yet.

Justin, are you still running your forked version or have you found an
"official" solution to this problem?

 

On Thursday, May 10, 2012 4:31:15 PM UTC+2, Guillaume Bort wrote:

Sorry but it works, and it is the proper way of doing it. We are using 
this for Heroku deployment (and I use it personally for all my Play 
2.0 deployment). 

So, again, run: 

$ play stage 
$ target/start 

Guillaume, might it be that this is a platform specific thing? Plainly it
did/does not work for Justin, and it does not work for me neither on
Ubuntu nor CentOS using Play 2.0.2.

Play starts, alright, but the process never returns unless killed.

Regards/S

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[Adam Lane]

I have been trying for hours to get supervisord to work on ec2 and it is giving me trouble.  Seems like it should be easy and I followed the directions but sometimes it starts ok and other times it fails after starting with the same error messages I get if I ctrl-c a forground run of play.  So not sure why it is killing play sometimes after start rather than daemonizing it.  I am sure it is my fault somewhere but since I only care that play starts at start of machine during autoscaling, here is an alternate solution:

Created script doRelease.sh in /home/ec2-user
--------
#!/bin/bash
sh dist-unzipped-folder/start -Dhttp.port=8080 >out 2>&1 &

Added line to /etc/rc.local
-------------------------------------------
su -c "/home/ec2-user/doRelease.sh" -s /bin/bash ec2-user

[Ben McCann]

Hey Adam,

Here's my supervisor config.  If you look in the stderr.log and stdout.log that are setup in the config then it'll usually give you an idea if something's wrong.

[program:mytest]

user=borg

command=/usr/local/borg/bin/mytest/mytest-1.0-SNAPSHOT/start -Dconfig.resource=prod.conf -Dlogger.resource=logger-prod.xml -Dhttp.port=8082 -Dpidfile.path=/dev/null

stderr_logfile=/var/log/mytest/stderr.log

stdout_logfile=/var/log/mytest/stdout.log

-Ben

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[Adam Lane]

If I use that config it does seem to be working.  I believe my problem was not calling the start like you have.  I was under the impression for supervisord to work you needed to call the java directly and whatever I had to call it directly probably had a typo or something. 

One thing that is an annoyince is that when I run "supervisorctl stop mytest" I get a bunch of errors in my stderr.log:

[info] play - Shutdown application default Akka system.
[ERROR] [10/24/2012 01:28:38.370] [application-akka.actor.default-dispatcher-5]
[TaskInvocation] There is no started application
java.lang.RuntimeException: There is no started application
        at scala.sys.package$.error(package.scala:27)
        at play.api.Play$$anonfun$current$1.apply(Play.scala:44)
        at play.api.Play$$anonfun$current$1.apply(Play.scala:44)
        at scala.Option.getOrElse(Option.scala:108)
        at play.api.Play$.current(Play.scala:44)
        at play.api.Play.current(Play.scala)
        at play.Play.application(Play.java:12)
        at controllers.admin.Products.refresh(Products.java:108)
        at Global$4.run(Global.java:120)
        at akka.dispatch.TaskInvocation.run(AbstractDispatcher.scala:94)
        at akka.jsr166y.ForkJoinTask$AdaptedRunnableAction.exec(ForkJoinTask.jav
a:1381)
        at akka.jsr166y.ForkJoinTask.doExec(ForkJoinTask.java:259)
        at akka.jsr166y.ForkJoinPool$WorkQueue.runTask(ForkJoinPool.java:975)
        at akka.jsr166y.ForkJoinPool.runWorker(ForkJoinPool.java:1479)
        at akka.jsr166y.ForkJoinWorkerThread.run(ForkJoinWorkerThread.java:104)

It doesn't seem to gracefully shutdown the Akka scheduler code in my global...
        if (Play.isProd()) {
            Akka.system().scheduler().schedule(
                Duration.create(1, TimeUnit.HOURS),
                Duration.create(12, TimeUnit.HOURS),
                new Runnable() {
                    public void run() {
                        Products.refresh();
                    }
            });
        }

I figured supervisord would send a sigterm just like I would do manually but this doesn't seem to happen in the logs when i do a "kill java" when starting it myself.  Is there a proper way to setup the "stop" of a supervisord play app? 

[Adam Lane]

I take that back, I get the same errors when i kill it manually so nothing to do with supervisord and should be another thread.  Thanks again everyone who contributed to starting our applications in the background.

[Juan Luis Suarez dos Santos]

Any centos script solution?

Justin.

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[Keith Miller]

Has this been fixed or addressed yet (in 2.1.0)? Not being able to launch in the background means I'm unable to use Play in production. 

And no, I don't want to install another application just to get Play to run in the background. Thanks!

[Keith Miller]

Hey, this worked perfect for me. Thanks so much!

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[menschg...@googlemail.com]

same here.

trying to run my play app while using jenkins as CI Server.
no luck :(

tried this line as a jenkins shell command but it wont work.
/sbin/start-stop-daemon --start --exec "/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/MyApp/target/start" --background

looks like jenkins is not able to start my app in background.
if i remove "--background" it works as expected.

but i need to run my app in background. otherwise jenkins is not able to "complete" the build process.

[Pathikrit Bhowmick]

How did you guys solve it?

I am creating play dist and executing as nohup bin/server &>>/tmp/play.log inside my deploy_script.sh and it never goes to the next line (and thus my build manager thinks build is not done).

Why can't I just simply background a play process like every other command in the universe???

[Ben McCann]

You can also pretty easily create a debian image or docker package since play includes sbt-native-packager. I think we'll be moving to a solution like that

https://github.com/sbt/sbt-native-packager

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[Keith Miller]

Sorry, I did this a while back and at a previous job so details are a bit fuzzy.

I used help I found around this mailing list (sorry, don’t remember or else I would reference here) to build a /etc/init.d/ service script. I posted a copy here:  https://gist.github.com/SingleMalt/df2e89d0bf97951290f6

You will have to do three things: 

• Deploy the Play app to /opt (or update the script)
• Put the application.conf under /etc/$NAME/application.conf (or update the script)
• Create a app.args file and place it under /etc/$NAME/app.args
• Here is an example of that file: https://gist.github.com/SingleMalt/bda4cf25a223e6fce616
• This gives you the ability to change Play startup settings without touching the service script

Then add the script to startup where you want it, based on your OS.

I’ve only ever used this on Linux (CentOS), but it should be fine on Debian/Ubuntu. Hope this helps. 

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