Deploying akka-http app to Cloud Foundry - Part 2

In a preceding post I had gone over the steps to deploy a simple akka-http app to Cloud Foundry. The gist of it was that as long there is a way to create a runnable fat(uber) jar, the deployment is very straightforward - Cloud Foundry's Java buildpack can take the bits and wire up everything needed to get it up an running in the Cloud Foundry environment.

Here I wanted to go over a slightly more involved scenario - this is where the app has an external database dependency say to a MySQL database.

In a local environment the details of the database would have been resolved using a configuration typically specified like this:

sampledb = {
  url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb?useSSL=false"
  user = "myuser"
  password = "mypass"
}

If the Mysql database were to be outside of Cloud Foundry environment this approach of specifying the database configuration will continue to work nicely. However if the service resides in a Cloud Foundry market place , then the details of the service is created dynamically at bind time with the Application.

Just to make this a little more concrete, in my local PCF Dev, I have a marketplace with "p-mysql" service available.

And if I were to create a "service instance" out of this:

and bind this instance to an app:

essentially what happens at this point is that the application has an environment variable called VCAP_SERVICES available to it and this has to be parsed to get the db creds. VCAP_SERVICES in the current scenario looks something like this:

{
  "p-mysql": [
   {
    "credentials": {
     "hostname": "mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io",
     "jdbcUrl": "jdbc:mysql://mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/myinstance?user=user\u0026password=pwd",
     "name": "myinstance",
     "password": "pwd",
     "port": 3306,
     "uri": "mysql://user:pwd@mysql-broker.local.pcfdev.io:3306/myinstance?reconnect=true",
     "username": "user"
    },
    "label": "p-mysql",
    "name": "mydb",
    "plan": "512mb",
    "provider": null,
    "syslog_drain_url": null,
    "tags": [
     "mysql"
    ]
   }
  ]
 }

This can be parsed very easily using Typesafe config, a sample (admittedly hacky) code looks like this:

  def getConfigFor(serviceType: String, name: String): Config = {
    val vcapServices = env("VCAP_SERVICES")
    val rootConfig = ConfigFactory.parseString(vcapServices)
    val configs = rootConfig.getConfigList(serviceType).asScala
      .filter(_.getString("name") == name)
      .map(instance => instance.getConfig("credentials"))

    if (configs.length > 0) configs.head
    else ConfigFactory.empty()
  }

and called the following way:

val dbConfig = cfServicesHelper.getConfigFor("p-mysql", "mydb")

This would dynamically resolve the credentials for mysql and would allow the application to connect to the database.

An easier way to follow all this may be to look at a sample code available in my github repo here - https://github.com/bijukunjummen/sample-akka-http-rest.