Deploying Web Application Using Vagrant

In this article, we will deploy a Spring web application in Tomcat 7 on Ubuntu 12.04 VM, created and provisioned using Vagrant. As an initial step,  Download Vagrant  specific to your operating system and install it in your machine.

Then create a folder on a drive, for me its "workspace" created on D drive (D:/workspace).

Now, open a command prompt and go to "workspace" folder and execute below command to clone the GIT repository on local drive:

git clone https://github.com/arpitaggarwal/hello-spring.git

Once clone completed, execute command:

vagrant init

Above command will create a Vagrant file (Vagrantfile), replace the content with below:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  # A standard Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit box
  # For more boxes, you can look at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search
  config.vm.box = "hashicorp/precise32"
  config.vm.provision "shell", path: "vagrant_provision.sh"
  # Create a private network, which allows host-only access to the machine
  # using a specific IP.
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"
end

Then create a vagrant_provision.sh file under same directory and copy below contents to the file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
sudo apt-get update
echo "Installing Apache.."
sudo apt-get install -y apache2
echo "Installing Tomcat.."
sudo apt-get install -y tomcat7
echo "Installing Tomcat7 docs.."
sudo apt-get install -y tomcat7-docs
echo "Installing Tomcat7 administration webapps.."
sudo apt-get install -y tomcat7-admin
echo "Installing Tomcat7 examples webapps.."
sudo apt-get install tomcat7-examples
echo "Installing Git.."
sudo apt-get install -y git
echo "Installing Maven.."
sudo apt-get install -y maven
echo "Installing Java 7.."
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common python-software-properties
echo oracle-java7-installer shared/accepted-oracle-license-v1-1 select true | sudo /usr/bin/debconf-set-selections
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer
echo "Setting environment variables for Java 7.."
sudo apt-get install -y oracle-java7-set-default

Then execute command:

vagrant up

Above command will make our VM up and running, also make an instance of Apache and Tomcat running (which we mentioned in vagrant_provison.sh).

To check if Apache is running, hit url : http://192.168.33.10 and to check if Tomcat is running, hit url : http://192.168.33.10:8080

Now, we will log into our newly created VM and build our project (cloned from Git) and copy it to the Tomcat deployment directory. So, we will first open our VM terminal executing below command:

vagrant ssh

Now we will first check where our project is, so execute below command:

cd /
ls

Now we can see folder name "vagrant", this is the folder which is linked to our host machine and going inside we will see our cloned project. Next we will go inside and build it executing below commands:

cd vagrant
cd hello-spring
mvn clean install

It will generate a target folder and our .war file inside it, now we will copy this .war to Tomcat 7 deployment directory after coming back to root directory, using command below:

cd /
sudo cp /vagrant/hello-spring/target/hello-spring.war /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/

Now, our application is copied to tomcat deployment directory and we are ready to hit the url and see our application running, but before that we have to change the Java version for tomcat, as our application is compiled using 1.7 and tomcat is using 1.6. It's easy, just go to the root directory and execute below commands:

cd etc/default 
nano tomcat7

And search for JAVA_HOME, uncomment it and edit as below:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle

Now, just restart the Tomcat instance, using command below:

service tomcat7 restart

Open the url : http://192.168.33.10:8080/hello-spring in host browser and we will see the welcome page of our Spring application.