Setup guide
The quick-start guide showed how to quickly launch a temporary instance of Apollo, but deploying the application to production normally involves some extra steps.
The general idea behind your deployment is to create a apollo-config.groovy
file from some existing sample files which
have sample settings for various database engines.
Production pre-requisites
You will minimally need to have Java 7 or greater, Grails, git, ant, a servlet container e.g. tomcat7+, jetty, or resin. An external database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL is generally used for production, but instructions for the H2 database is also provided.
Database configuration
Apollo supports several database backends, and you can choose sample configurations from using H2, Postgres, or MySQL by default.
Each has a file called sample-h2-apollo-config.groovy
or sample-postgres-apollo-config.groovy
that is designed to be
renamed to apollo-config.groovy before running apollo deploy
. Additionally there is a
sample-docker-apollo-config.groovy
which allows control of the configuration via environment variables.
Furthermore, the apollo-config.groovy
has different groovy environments for test, development, and production modes.
The environment will be selected automatically selected depending on how it is run, e.g:
apollo deploy
orapollo release
use the production environment (i.e. when you copy the war file to your production- server)
apollo run-local
orapollo debug
use the development environment (i.e. when you are running it locally) apollo test
uses the test environment (i.e. only when running unit tests)
Configure for H2:
- H2 is an embedded database engine, so no external setups are needed. Simply copy sample-h2-apollo-config.groovy to apollo-config.groovy.
Configure for PostgreSQL:
- Create a new database with postgres for production mode (i.e. via the command line
createdb apollo-production
) and copy the sample-postgres-apollo-config.groovy to apollo-config.groovy.
Configure for MySQL:
- Create a new MySQL database for production mode (i.e. run
`create database
apollo-production``` in the mysql console) and copy the sample-postgres-apollo-config.groovy to apollo-config.groovy.
Configure for Docker:
- Set up and export all of the environment variables you wish to configure. At bare minimum you will likely wish to set
WEBAPOLLO_DB_USERNAME
,WEBAPOLLO_DB_PASSWORD
,WEBAPOLLO_DB_DRIVER
,WEBAPOLLO_DB_DIALECT
, andWEBAPOLLO_DB_URI
- Create a new database in your chosen database backend and copy the sample-docker-apollo-config.groovy to apollo-config.groovy.
Database schema
After you startup the application, the database schema (tables, etc.) is automatically setup. You don't have to initialize any database schemas yourself.
Deploy the application
The apollo run-local
command only launches a temporary server and should really not be used in production, so to
deploy to production, we build a new WAR file with the apollo deploy
command. After you have setup your
apollo-config.groovy
file, and it has the appropriate username, password, and JDBC URL in it, then we can run the
command:
./apollo deploy
This command will package the application and it will download any missing pre-requisites (jbrowse) into a WAR file in the "target/" subfolder. After it completes, you can then copy the WAR file from the target folder to your webapps folder. If you name the file apollo.war in your webapps folder, then you can access your app at "http://localhost:8080/apollo"
Alternatively, as we alluded to previously, you can also launch a temporary instance of the server which is useful for testing
./apollo run-local 8085
This temporary server will be accessible at "http://localhost:8085/apollo"
Note on database settings
If you use the apollo run-local
command, then the "development" section of the apollo-config.groovy is used (or an
temporary in-memory H2 database is used if no apollo-config.groovy exists).
If you use the WAR file generated by the apollo deploy
command on your own webserver, then the "production" section of
the apollo-config.groovy is used.
Detailed build instructions
While the shortcut apollo deploy
takes care of basic application deployment, understanding the full build process of
Apollo can help you to optimize and improve your deployed instances.
To learn more about the architecture of webapollo, view the architecture guide but the main idea here
is to learn how to use apollo release
to construct a build that includes javascript minimization
Pre-requisites for Javascript minimization
In addition to the system pre-requisites, the javascript compilation will use nodejs, which can be installed from a package manager on many platforms. Recommended setup for different platforms:
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo yum install epel-release npm
brew install node
Install extra perl modules
Building apollo in release mode also requires some extra Perl modules, namely Text::Markdown and DateTime. One way to install them:
bin/cpanm -l extlib DateTime Text::Markdown
Performing the javascript minimization
To build a Apollo release with Javascript minimization, you can use the command
./apollo release
This will compile JBrowse and Apollo javascript code into minimized files so that the number of HTTP requests that the client needs to make are reduced.
In all other respects, apollo release
is exactly the same as apollo deploy
though.
Performing active development
To perform active development of the codebase, use
./apollo debug
This will launch a temporary instance of Apollo by running grails run-app
and ant devmode
at the same time,
which means that any changes to the Java files will be picked up, allowing fast iteration.
If you modify the javascript files (i.e. the client directory), you can run scripts/copy_client.sh
and these will be
picked up on-the-fly too.