Effy's Blog

In my last post I have indicated that I am currently exploring the Play Framework (latest version 2.1.3) in detail. And as one of my points of interest I chose to examine some options of running an application in cloud. I was deciding between Heroku and OpenShift and the title of this post already gave away my interim decision. The most obvious difference between those two cloud services is that OpenShift does not provide out of the box support for Play applications. But I do not consider it to be a deal breaker as long as a Play application works there. When I started doing a light research on the subject of running Play application on OpenShift, most influential findings I found were OpenShift's blog post and Play2 OpenShift Quickstart at Github . There were others, but the basic Idea was that you can not run Play 2.x application natively (using embedded Netty and Play's command line). Long story short: you can!

I have recently begun experimenting with the Play Framework and I think it is great. Definitely something worth looking into. This post is based on my experience with Play 2.1.2, but I am convinced that it applies to 2.0.x versions as well (and quite possibly to older versions too). I am using an embeded Netty server that is a build in default server in Play Framework. Play works just fine if you are satisfied with the defaults, but the alternative configuration can pose a challenge. The default bind address is 0.0.0.0:9000 and it fine, but I needed it to change to meet the OpenShift 's demands. I wanted to bind a Play application on one specific address along with a non standard port. The configuration described in the Play's documentation works, but only from the Play's console and I needed to launch the application directly from the command line and that is where I got stuck for quite a while. And this is what I found out.