Deploy Grails Apps in 3 simple steps to Amazon Beanstalk

We can easy deploy the Grails WAR file to Amazon Beanstalk in 3 simple steps:

• We have to create an Amazon Web Services Account (this part is not described is this post)
• We have to make a MySQL database. We use Amazon RDS
• We have to make the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and deploy the WAR

Important note before you start!

We need security groups, to connect local client tools and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk to the MySQL Database Instance.  To succeed to make this connection it is important to install Amazon RDS and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk in the same region. At this moment you can choose only select one region for setting up Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (US  East) so your region for Amazon RDS must be ‘US East’.

Make MySQL Database Instance with Amazon RDS

1) Sign in to the AWS Management Console and choose for the RDS tab

2) Press the Launch DB Instance Button

You see the first screen. In our case we fill in the following:

Allocated Storage: 5
DB Instance Identifier: db
Master User Name: root
Master User Password: mysql

The other fields will have the default value

3) In the second screen you can enter some additional configuration

Database name: database

The other fields will have the default value

4) In the other screen you can enter some management options like backup scedule etc.

5) After you review all the info and pressing the Launch button you get an available MySQL Database Instance!

Fill in the DB security group to authorize access from local client tools and elastic beanstalk

Enter in the default security group:

1) a CIDR/IP connection type with IP/32 of the machine with client tools. Fill in your IP, to haven direct access with your own client tools
2) a EC2 Security Group type with Security Group:elasticbeanstalk-default and enter your AWS Account ID

Make the elastic beanstalk and deploy the Grails WAR

1) We use the production evironment option in the datasource.groovy to put in the Amazon information. Use the endpoint of the Amazon RDS / MySQL Database Instance as the machinename and the Amazon Beanstalk environment in the jdbc connection.

production {
        dataSource {
            pooled = true
            driverClassName = "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
            dbCreate = "update" // one of 'create', 'create-drop','update'
            username = 'root'
            password = 'mysql'
            url = 'jdbc:mysql://'endpoint':3306/'environment''
            dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
            properties {
                validationQuery = "SELECT 1"
                testOnBorrow = true
                testOnReturn = true
                testWhileIdle = true
                timeBetweenEvictionRunsMillis = 1000 * 60 * 30
                numTestsPerEvictionRun = 3
                minEvictableIdleTimeMillis = 1000 * 60 * 30
            }
        }
    }

2) Create the Grails WAR with the correct datasource.groovy file.

Enter an environment is our case : environment

Upload a Grails WAR file: appname.war

You can edit your environment. See the manual Elastic Beanstalk guide

After successfully upload en deploy of the Grails WAR file you see a little green square!

At this point you have successfully upload and deploy your Grails App to the Amazon Cloud!!!

Look at http://environment.elasticbeanstalk.com/ and enjoy!!!