Deployment

Running Standalone

To create a standalone executable for your application simply run

lein uberjar

The resulting jar can be found in the target folder. It can be run as follows:

java -jar myapp.jar

By default the standalone application uses an embedded Immutant server to run the application. However, if you used a profile such as +jetty then the alternate server will be used instead. To specify a custom port you need to set the $PORT environment variable, eg:

export PORT=8080
java -jar myapp.jar

Deploying on Immutant App Server

Please follow the steps outlined in the official Immutant documentation for Immutant application server deployment.

Deploying to Tomcat

A WAR archive needs to be generated in order to deploy the application to a container such as Apache Tomcat. This is only supported via the lein-uberwar plugin that's included using the +war profile.

To enable the lein-uberwar plugin manually add the following configuration in the project.clj file:

:plugins [...
          [lein-uberwar "0.1.0"]]

  :uberwar {:handler <app>.handler/app
            :init <app>.handler/init
            :destroy <app>.handler/destroy
            :name "<app>.war"}

In order to create a WAR you can package the application by running:

lein uberwar

Next, simply copy the resulting <app>.war to the webapps folder on Tomcat, eg:

cp target/<app>.war ~/tomcat/webapps/

Your app will now be avaliable at the context /<app> when Tomcat starts. To deploy the app at root context, simply copy it to webapp as ROOT.war.

VPS Deployment

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) such as DigitalOcean provide a cheap hosting option for Clojure applications.

Follow this guide in order to setup your DigitalOcean server. Once the server is created you can install Ubuntu as described here. Finally, install Java on your Ubuntu instance by following these instructions. The instructions below apply for Ubuntu 15.04 and newer.

The most common approach is to run the uberjar and front it using Nginx.

Application deployment

In this step, we will deploy your application to the server, and make sure that it is started automatically on boot. We use systemd for this. Create a deploy user that will run your application:

sudo adduser -m deploy
sudo passwd -l deploy

Create a directory for your application on the server such as /var/myapp then upload your application to the server using scp:

$ scp myapp.jar user@<domain>:/var/myapp/

You should now test that you're able to run the application. Connect to the server using ssh and run the application:

java -jar /var/myapp/myapp.jar

If everything went well, your application now runs locally. The following command will confirm that the applications runs as expected:

curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/

Your application should also now be accessible on the server at http://<domain>:3000. If your application is not accessible make sure that the firewall is configured to allow access to the port. Depending on your VPS provider, you may need to create an access point for the port 3000.

Now, let's stop the application instance and create a systemd configuration to manage its lifecycle, especially taking care that the application will be launched on server boot. Create the file /lib/systemd/system/myapp.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=My Application
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/var/myapp
EnvironmentFile=-/var/myapp/env
Environment="DATABASE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://localhost/app?user=app_user&password=secret"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -jar /var/myapp/myapp.jar
User=deploy

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note that by default JVM is fairly aggressive about memory usage. If you're like to reduce the amount of memory used then you can add the following line under the [Service] configuration:

[Service]
...
_JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xmx256m"
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -jar /var/myapp/myapp.jar

This will limit the maximum amount of memory that the JVM is allowed to use. Now we can tell systemd to start the application everytimes the system reboots with the following commands:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable myapp.service

When the system reboots your application will now start and will be ready to process requests. You may want to test that. Simply reboot your machine, and check the running processes:

 ps -ef | grep java

This should return something like this. Pay attention to the UID, it should be deploy, leaving it to root would present a significant security risk.

deploy     730     1  1 06:45 ?        00:00:42 /usr/bin/java -jar /var/mysite/mysite.jar

Fronting with Nginx

Install Nginx using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install nginx

Next, make a backup of the default configuration in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and replace it with a custom configuration file for the application such as:

server{
  listen 80 default_server;
  listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
  server_name localhost mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

  access_log /var/log/myapp_access.log;
  error_log /var/log/myapp_error.log;

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_redirect  off;
  }
}

Restart Nginx by running:

sudo service nginx restart

Then test that the application is available at http://<domain>.

Optionally, you can configure Nginx to serve static resources for the application. In order to do that you will need to ensure that all static resources are served using a common prefix such as static. Next, upload the resources/public/static folder from your application to the server to a location such as /var/myapp/static by running the following command from the project folder:

scp -r resources/public/static user@<domain>:/var/myapp/static

Now add the following additional configuration option under the server section of the Ngnix configuration above:

location /static/ {
    alias /var/myapp/static/;
  }

This will cause Nginx to bypass your application for any requests to http://<domain>/static and serve them directly instead.

To enable compression make sure the following settings are present in your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;">

Setting up SSL

If your site has any user authentication then you will also want to use HTTPS. You will first need to provide a SSL certificate and its key. We'll call these cert.crt and cert.key respectively.

Setting up SSL Certificate using Let's Encrypt

Download the installation tool and generate the certificate using the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt
cd letsencrypt
/letsencrypt-auto certonly --email <you@email.com> -d <yoursite.com> -d <www.yoursite.com> --webroot --webroot-path /var/www/html

Optionally, setup a Cron job to automatically update the certificate by updating crontab by running as root:

su
crontab -e

Add the following line:

0 0 1,15 * * /path-to-letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto certonly --keep-until-expiring --email <you@email.com> -d <yoursite.com> -d <www.yoursite.com> --webroot --webroot-path /var/www/html

We'll generate a stronger DHE parameter instead of using OpenSSL's defaults, which include a 1024-bit key for the key-exchange:

cd /etc/ssl/certs
openssl dhparam -out dhparam.pem 4096

Next, you'll want to update the configuration in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default as follows:

server {
    listen 80;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {

    listen 443;
    server_name localhost mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

    ssl_certificate           /etc/letsencrypt/live/<yoursite.com>/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key       /etc/letsencrypt/live/<yoursite.com>/privkey.pem;

    ssl on;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers  on;
    ssl_session_timeout        180m;
    ssl_session_cache  builtin:1000  shared:SSL:10m;
    ssl_protocols  TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
    ssl_ciphers 'AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';
    ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;
    add_header Strict-Transport-Security 'max-age=31536000';

    access_log /var/log/myapp_access.log;
    error_log /var/log/myapp_error.log;

    location / {

      proxy_set_header        Host $host;
      proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

      # Fix the “It appears that your reverse proxy set up is broken" error.
      proxy_pass          http://localhost:3000;
      proxy_read_timeout  90;

      proxy_redirect      http://localhost:3000 https://mydomain.com;
    }
  }

The above will cause Nginx to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS and use the provided certificate to serve them.

Finally, configure your firewall to only allow access to specified ports by running the following commands:

$ sudo ufw allow ssh
$ sudo ufw allow http
$ sudo ufw allow https
$ sudo ufw enable

You can test the SSL configuration using the SSL Server Test.

Heroku Deployment

First, make sure you have Git and Heroku toolbelt installed, then simply follow the steps below.

Optionally, test that your application runs locally by running.

heroku local

Now, you can initialize your git repo and commit your application.

git init
git add .
git commit -m "init"

create your app on Heroku

heroku create

optionally, create a database for the application

heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql

The connection settings can be found at your Heroku dashboard under the add-ons for the app.

deploy the application

git push heroku master

Your application should now be deployed to Heroku!

To initialize or update your database:

heroku run lein run migrate

For further instructions see the official documentation.

Enabling nREPL

Luminus comes setup with nREPL that allows connecting to a REPL on a the server. This functionality can useful for debugging as well as hotfixing updates in the running application. To enable nREPL support set the NREPL_PORT envrionment variable to the desired port.

export NREPL_PORT=7000

To test the REPL connection simply run the following command:

lein repl :connect 7001

You can also connect your favorite IDE to a remote REPL just as you would connect to a local one.

When running on a remote server it is recommended to forward the REPL port to the local machine using SSH:

ssh -L 7001:localhost:7001 remotehost