In our Linux environment applications are restarted periodically (the reasons aren't important here). It would be convenient for us to deploy new versions of an application by copying the application Spring Boot jar on top of the existing (old) jar thereby overwriting it and then simply wait for the application to restart (that is, the JVM running the application to restart).
However, this seems to not work. We get different kinds of errors - sometimes the app just hangs, sometimes we get a ClassNotFoundException. It's as if Spring Boot (or something inside Spring Boot) reopens the jar and expects it to be the same one it was when the application was originally started.
We had a look through Spring's common application properties, but didn't see anything appropriate. Is there a way to make this work? When we were using WAR files we configured the servlet container to unpack the WAR file and run from the unpacked version. Can we do something similar with Spring Boot?
First of all the errors you are experiencing can come from multiple sources. Usually replacing the file from a process is not a big problem as the whole file is loaded into memory before execution. Java is a little bit different, because the actual process that is running is the JVM and it only loads the jar file from disk. The JVM loads classes only on demand, this means if there was any class that was not loaded before it will try to load it and most likely fail, if the jar file is different. In the case of spring boot there are also other resources (such as HTML files) inside the jar file that are dynamically loaded.
You mentioned you are using a linux environment. If you can just replace your startup with a script you can just copy the jar and start it from the copied location:
#!/bin/bash
JAR_NAME="spring-boot.jar"
NEW_JAR_NAME=".$JAR_NAME" # Use an appropriate name here
cp $JAR_NAME $NEW_JAR_NAME
java -jar $NEW_JAR_NAME
rm $NEW_JAR_NAME
Now every time you start the application a copy is being made and started from there. You can replace the original jar and on the next restart the new application will load.
You coud also use rsync instead of cp to avoid copying the same jar twice, if the application is restarted multiple times without changing the jar.
It would be convenient for us to deploy new versions of an application
by copying the Spring Boot jar on top of the existing (old) jar and
then simply wait for the application to restart
Why would you do such a thing to yourself? You are trying solve a usecase that's against best practices, sound like asking for trouble just to avoid an app restart. When you are doing a deployment, you need to make sure the deployment went through, otherwise how will you troubleshoot if something goes wrong in your application, you will have one more variable in hand when you troubleshoot, i,e the uncertainty of current version of the code.
If you are having downtime while deploying (I am assuming thats why you want to limit the restarts), why don't you bring up another instance with the newer version of code and once its healthy shutdown the old one
Related
I am new to Spring Boot from php world. In Php development, it is simple to make changes on the file, upload and run.
But on Spring boot, my development relies on remote ubuntu server, every time I make change in *.java, I have to build the Fat Jar, upload the Jar, kill the current java process on ubuntu, and run the java -jar my.jar again, which spend much time on the upload because the Jar is about 60 mb.
Is there any way I can work like php, just upload the changed file, so the spring boot just compile the class and run?
Does change to build *.war help to faster deployment?
There are a few option to mitigate the roundtrip of building the jar file and upload it.
Hot-swap: For minor changes, you can hot-swap changes automatially when you have a remote-debugger attached. I use Intellij as Ide, which provide this out of the box after a file is recompiled, see more at this link how to enable it.
Reloading tool: use a tool that are designed to reload Java classes, such as JRebel which extends the classloader and updates a class if a change has been detected. However, they are often only available in a paid version.
Spring Boot dev-tools: this tool also monitors changes and restart the application with the new changes (so no need to rebuild the jar file). It is possible to use on a remote application. See this link for more info.
Using a war file is different concept since a war file is executed inside an application container (e.g a Wildfly server). You can dynamically upload a war file to a running application server, which will only restart the war file. But I'm not sure if this will lead to faster deployment, however it is a different approach how the application is run.
I have two java applications:
a server starting with spring boot
a client using it (through REST api)
For the time, I start both applications in differents processes.
How could I start the server from the client to obtain a "standalone" application? The use of ProcessBuilder to call java.exe is a solution, but it has drawbacks: it will be OS dependant and cannot assure the server process will be shutdown / killed as the client leaves.
From the architecture point of view leave them separate is the best option, as you have a server and a client separate, it will be the behavior in a productive environment.
If you need it only during the development phase, and your reason to run both together is to save time, you can build both in containers using Docker. Basically create two applications, building from two different folders, and then you will start both together.
I found a solution in https://www.toptal.com/spring-boot/spring-boot-application-programmatic-launch . Igor Delac
opens the jar file containing the server to find the class ...loader.archive.JarFileArchive (and some other)
instanciates it and uses it to start the application on the jar itself.
The jar file is not extracted nor modified. Only a few classes are read.
Could be a silly question, but...
I have a Spring-based WAR application that runs 80% of the installations on Tomcat and the rest 20% on WebSphere.
I need to simply get the path of the folder where Spring's MultipartFilter (using Commons multipart resolver) stores files being uploaded. I have never set it manually, and it actually belongs to the Catalina work directory as I found out in my Tomcat installations.
For the moment, I just need to get that path. I have control of my application so no one is going to change it without notice.
I would like to know if there is a server-agnostic way to know where my Spring-based application is going to store Multipart files.
E.g. from this question I can see I can use catalina.base, but in Tomcat... not in JBoss or WebSphere. It could cost me a couple of if/else statements...
Spring tries to do it already when no default value is set
WebUtils.getTempDir(servletContext)
Which simply does:
return ((File)servletContext.getAttribute("javax.servlet.context.tempdir"));
So simply if no one overrides that location in the filter properties (and that is my case) I can rely on the default.
More in general, one may have to inspect the instance of DiskItemFileFactory to get the path to the repository
I have a spring boot application that currently runs in embedded Tomcat. I have a file, states.csv, that I want to parse on startup and seed my states database table (I tried via liquibase but that refuses to work).
I put the file in resources/main/ and that appears to work fine. My question is, if I decided against embedded Tomcat in the future (say moving to AWS or a regular Tomcat), is this still the best location to keep files for use?
I don't want to code myself into a corner if there is a better way to do this.
This depends entirely on how you're reading the file. As long as you're grabbing it out of the classpath, you should be fine. (And I've run single-jar applications on both basic AWS VMs and Cloud Foundry on EC2 with no difficulty at all.)
What is the best practice to make changes in beans.xml file in production environment?
Lets imagine Hello World application with one Interface and 2 Implementations. After creating jar and running JVM how can we change implementation in beans.xml without opening jar and reassembling it afterwards?
Is it any trick that permits having beans.xml outside the jar, but without knowing the full file-system path?
On top of suggestion made by OrangeDog, I would suggest considering leaving the beans.xml inside your deployed application AND using the PropertyOverrideConfigurer mechanism.
Configure an override configurer to point to some fixed path outside of the application, something like /opt/configuration/something/override.properties would be ideal. If you can't use an absolute path, you can always try to play with file:../../.. style of paths. Then you can list only the changed values within the override.properties file.
Don't have the XML in a JAR. Your application should be deployed in at least a WAR, which the app server will probably "explode". The folder WEB-INF/classes will be added to the classpath. You can make changes to the exploded XML here and the app server should detect this and reload the app.
Edit:
If you are using plain Java SE, you can use a system property to pass the location of the XML file. System.getProperty("property") in code and -Dproperty=value on the command line.