Setting up a Play Framework application on RedHat's Openshift

Play framework is an interesting web development option, using Netty directly as a web server, providing a basic MVC framework to build web applications on. A

Here's how you marry them both.. The documentation out there (git quick starts ) seem to be outdated. But, its simple really and truly DIY.. So, thought I would let people know.

1. Install Play 2.0 

Spin up the play server and make sure something renders on the localhost.

2. Open an account with openshift.com and create a DIY application

When you checkout the git projects, by default, you get the following directory structure with a Ruby script to serve up a index.html page.

$ ls -a 

. .. .git .openshift README diy misc

$ ls diy 

logs  index.html  testrubyserver.rb

$ ls .openshift/action_hooks 

build  deploy  post_deploy  pre_build  start  stop

3. Package your Play app

$ play stage
$ target/start

Now, copy target folder to

$ cp -rf target $OPENSHIFT_PROJECT_GIT_REPO/diy/

Throw away the index.html

$ git rm diy/index.html

4. Change the start and stop scripts

Make sure we bring up the Play server on the correct ip and port.


$ cat .openshift/action_hooks/start
#!/bin/bash
# The logic to start up your application should be put in this
# script. The application will work only if it binds to
# $OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP:8080
nohup $OPENSHIFT_REPO_DIR/diy/target/start -Dhttp.port=$OPENSHIFT_DIY_PORT -Dhttp.address=$OPENSHIFT_DIY_IP  >> $OPENSHIFT_HOMEDIR/app-root/logs/server.log 2>&1 &


$ cat .openshift/action_hooks/stop
#!/bin/bash
# The logic to stop your application should be put in this script.
kill `ps -ef | grep "play.core.server.NettyServer" | grep -v grep | awk '{ print $2 }'` > /dev/null 2>&1
exit 0

$ git add diy/target
$ git commit -a 
$ git push



That's it..