TorqueBox on OpenShift

Here is a quick way to try out your Ruby application running in TorqueBox on OpenShift.

By default, this quickstart will install TorqueBox 3.0.0. You can specify a different version by tweaking .openshift/torquebox.sh, but any release older than 3.0.0.beta1 won't work. ;-)

Running on OpenShift

Create an account at https://www.openshift.com

Ensure you have the latest version of the client tools.

Create a jbossas-7 application from the code in this repository:

rhc app create yourapp jbossas-7 -s --from-code git://github.com/jjfraz11/openshift-torquebox.git

That's it! The first build will take a minute or two, so be patient. You should ssh to your app and run tail_all so you'll have something to watch while your app deploys.

When you see Deployed "your-knob.yml" in the log, point a browser at the following link (adjusted for your namespace) and you should see a friendly welcome:

http://yourapp-$namespace.rhcloud.com

Any changes you push from the yourapp/ directory will trigger a redeploy of your app.

At this point, you can either write your app from scratch, or you can merge in changes from an existing project, i.e. your real app.

git remote add yourrealapp -m master git@github.com:yourorg/yourrealapp.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs yourrealapp master
git push

Now whenever you're ready to deploy your real app to OpenShift, you pull in changes from your real repo and push to your OpenShift repo.

Drop in to the #torquebox IRC channel on freenode.net if you have any questions.

Faster development deployments

If you'd like to take advantage of faster deployments provided by TorqueBox, you'll need to trigger the TorqueBox-specific restart marker and start using rhc deploy.

rhc app-configure --no-auto-deploy # Configure your application to disable auto deploy (only need to run this once)
mkdir -p tmp
touch tmp/restart.txt
git add tmp/restart.txt
git commit -m "Use faster deploys for the web runtime"
git push
rhc deploy --hot-deploy

Now every time you push code the TorqueBox web runtime will be restarted without dropping any web requests. See http://torquebox.org/documentation/current/deployment.html#zero-downtime-redeployment for the different markers you can use to restart non-web runtimes.

To switch back to regular deployments, remove tmp/restart.txt, commit, push the application, and stop using --hot-deploy with rhc deploy.

Database Migrations

If you have a Rails application and want to run database migrations on every new code push, uncomment the db_migrate line from .openshift/action_hooks/pre_start_jbossas-7. If you don't use Rails and still need to run migrations, edit the db_migrate function in .openshift/torquebox.sh to fit your needs.

Connecting VisualVM to TorqueBox on OpenShift

You can use OpenShift's port forwarding feature to connect a local VisualVM to your TorqueBox instances running in OpenShift. In a local terminal window, initiate port forwarding:

rhc port-forward -a yourapp

Take note of which local port the remote port 9999 gets forwarded to - this should be 9999 unless you already have something listening locally on that same port.

Now we need to boot VisualVM with the jboss-cli-client.jar on the classpath. This JAR is found within the TorqueBox distribution.

jvisualvm --cp:a $TORQUEBOX_HOME/jboss/bin/client/jboss-cli-client.jar

Now add a new JMX Connection in VisualVM (File -> Add JMX Connection) and enter service:jmx:remoting-jmx://localhost:9999 as the connection string, substituting port 9999 if necessary. No security credentials are needed.

After the connection is added, double-click on it in VisualVM's left pane to connect to the remote TorqueBox server.