Lift Tutorial 2: Nice Server with Jetty and MongoDB

What this tutorial will cover

• EC2 instance
• Jetty
• MongoDB
• Screen (to have both Jetty and MongoDB running in the background and see the output)
• Easy deployment script (SCP)

EC2 instance

I just got a free micro EC2 instance at AWS (Amazon Web Services) for 1 year for free (see here) and thought I could try out Scala and Lift on it. I did that once already to test, but this time I wanted a nicer installation. I wanted to use Jetty as Server that is always running on the ec2 instance. Then I want to be able to easily deploy .war files to it.

If you are on windows and you want to connect to your EC2 with Putty follow the instructions here.

Jetty

To get a basic jetty version running on your server, do the following:

JETTY_VERSION=7.3.1.v20110307
wget http://download.eclipse.org/jetty/$JETTY_VERSION/dist/jetty-distribution-$JETTY_VERSION.tar.gz
tar xfz jetty-distribution-$JETTY_VERSION.tar.gz
cd jetty-distribution-$JETTY_VERSION
java -jar start.jar 

There you go. Your basic jetty installation is running already! Put a .war file into the webapps folder and access it by adding the name of the war file to the url (filename.war => http://server.com/filename/ )

More information under http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/

MongoDB

To install and run MongoDB on your own computer follow the instructions here: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Quickstart (their explanation is perfect :) ) To install and run MongoDB on EC2 follow those instructions: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Amazon+EC2 Here some links for starting with MongoDB on Scala:

• Video showing how to use MongoDB in Scala: http://ontwik.com/nosql/mongodb-with-scala/
• Links by MongoDB themselves: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Java+Language+Center#JavaLanguageCenter-Scala
  Screen

Try screen -S jetty and then start Jetty there. To leave that “screen” press CTRL A + D. To see that screen again enter screen -r jetty. You can do the same with another name for MongoDB, just use mongodb instead of jetty in the command.

Easy deployment script (SCP)

Sometimes typing sbt package and scp ... can be too much. :D So I wrote a small script that does the work for you. Create a file called deploy in the root of the sbt project, adjust the values below SETTINGS and make chmod +x deploy. After that you can run it with ./deploy. Have fun :)

#!/usr/bin/env scala
import java.io._
import scala.runtime.RichChar
import scala.io.Source
import scala.util.matching.Regex
import scala.collection.immutable.Stream  
// SETTINGS
val FILE_NAME_ON_SERVER = "1.war"
val SCP_SERVER_NAME = "ec2.my_server.ch"
val SCP_SERVER_USER = "ec2-user"
val SCP_SERVER_ID_LOCATION = "/Users/patrickboos85/.ssh/my_server.id"
val SCP_SERVER_FOLDER = "/home/ec2-user/jetty/webapps"  
println("### PACKAGING as .war (sbt package)")
def p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("sbt package")
val WarFileExp = """.*Packaging \.(.*\.war) \.\.\..*""".r
var warLocation : String = ""
for (
    line <- Source.fromInputStream(p.getInputStream()).getLines
) {
    println(line)
    if ((line contains "Packaging") && (line contains ".war")) {
        val WarFileExp(warFile) = line
        warLocation = System.getProperty("user.dir") + warFile
    }
}
if (warLocation.length() > 0) {
    val warFile = new File(warLocation)
    println("### RENAMING TO " + FILE_NAME_ON_SERVER)
    val renamedWarFile = new File(warFile.getParent + "/" + FILE_NAME_ON_SERVER)
    warFile.renameTo(renamedWarFile)  
    println("### UPLOADING (this will take quite some time)")  
    val scpCommand = "scp -i " + SCP_SERVER_ID_LOCATION + " " + renamedWarFile.getAbsolutePath + " " + SCP_SERVER_USER + "@" + SCP_SERVER_NAME + ":" + SCP_SERVER_FOLDER  
    def p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(scpCommand)  
    Source.fromInputStream(p.getInputStream()).foreach(print(_))
    Source.fromInputStream(p.getErrorStream()).foreach(print(_))  
    println("### DONE")
} else {
    println("### .war file was not created. See output. Maybe deployed already?")
}

Sadly it does not show the SCP output :(. If you figure out how to do it, please let me know in the comments.

Maybe later we will go into writing a WebService: http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/REST_Web_Services