Upstart Script for the PlayFramework 1.x

playframework

# Upstart script for a play application that binds to an unprivileged user.
# put this into a file like /etc/init/playframework
# you can then start/stop it using either initctl or start/stop/restart
# e.g. 
# start playframework
# http://dominikdorn.com

description     "Description of your app"
author          "Dominik Dorn <[email protected]>"
version         "1.0"

env PLAY_BINARY=/opt/play/current/play
env HOME=/home/sgwebsite/apps/playapp/
env USER=sgwebsite
env GROUP=sgwebsite
env PROFILE=hyper

start on (filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=lo) or runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
respawn limit 10 5
umask 022
expect fork


pre-start script
        test -x $PLAY_BINARY || { stop; exit 0; }
        test -c /dev/null || { stop; exit 0; }
        chdir ${HOME}
        rm ${HOME}/server.pid || true
        $PLAY_BINARY dependencies $HOME
end script

pre-stop script
        exec $PLAY_BINARY stop $HOME
end script

post-stop script
        rm ${HOME}/server.pid || true
end script

script
exec start-stop-daemon --start --exec $PLAY_BINARY --chuid $USER:$GROUP --chdir $HOME -- start $HOME --%$PROFILE
end script

Just a couple of details that might save somebody some time. In order to get this to work on ubuntu 12.04 I had to:

• put this script to /etc/init/playframework.conf instead of /etc/init/playframework
• use commands sudo service playframework start/stop/restart/status to control the script.

Great work, btw!

If I wanted to specify extra JVM flags (e.g. -Xmx1G) using this script ... what would be a good way to do it?

It seems the answer is simply adding the flags after the script command. E.g.

exec start-stop-daemon --start --exec $PLAY_BINARY --chuid $USER:$GROUP --chdir $HOME -- start $HOME --%$PROFILE -Xmx1G

I'm trying to get that upstart script work for a play1-2.5 app on a Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS box (free Amazon EC2 micro instance). The app gets started and stopped as expected, but sudo start/stop myapp never returns and keeps waiting for ever with no output. Ultimately, I have to restart the machine in order to be able to start the service again. I' wondering if this might be related to this bug report...

Anyone managed to get this working under this environment?

Quick question is, which location should I save this script to in my ubuntu env?

Thanks,
Tim

@mcmug8 - in /etc/init/ - this is where upstart saves its service scripts.
@jtammen - I'm seeing the same issue on ubuntu 12.10, dunno why. It worked well for us on 11.04 for some time.

@jtammen - this indeed was the problem for me.
The fix was:

1. Change 'expect fork' to 'expect daemon'
2. sudo initctl reload-configuration
3. Restart the machine (this step is mandatory for some reason)

What's the meaning of profile=hyper?