Bluemix: Simplified Deployment of Complex Cloud Foundry Apps

Two apps from single manifest

Recently, I was looking over a microservice-based app to be deployed to IBM Bluemix. There app consisted of several pieces, the app itself and multiple services. Fortunately, all could be deployed with a single "push". Here is how.

Cloud Foundry allows multiple apps to be described with a single manifest file. That is, properties for several apps (or services) can be put together. For each app its name and the location where its code is found need to be specified. They are shown in blue in my sample manifest file. Each app can be deployed to a specific machine, identified by the host and domain name. For the example I chose a different approach. It is the relatively new "routes" property. It allows to combine those properties and even add paths information. The routing is highlighted in yellow below. All I needed to do is to execute a simple "cf push" command and the entire application with its multiple pieces got deployed.


Here is the sample manifest.yml file:

# This manifest deploys two applications.
#
# Both use the same host and domain name as defined
# by their respective route(s) property. The first app
# uses the root path, the second the "sub" and
# "lower" paths.

applications:
# The Python app starts here
- name: yourname-myapp
  memory: 256M
  command: python myapp.py
  routes:
  - route: yourname-myapp.mybluemix.net
  path: ./top/ 

# 

# The Node.js app starts here 

#

 - name: yourname-myapp-node
  routes:
  - route: yourname-myapp.mybluemix.net/lower
  - route: yourname-myapp.mybluemix.net/sub
  path: ./lower/

If you wonder how the entire project looks like, visit https://github.com/data-henrik/Bluemix-ContextPathRouting for the source code and a more detailed description. I put this repository together to showcase Context Path Routing on IBM Bluemix which I will discuss in an upcoming blog post.