Clojure Deployment with Immutant and WildFly on Ubuntu 14.04

Updated Tuesday, December 18, 2018 by Sergey Pariev Contributed by Sergey Pariev

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Clojure is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on functional programming. It is a dialect of the Lisp programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). While Clojure allows you to write elegant and concise code, its ability to make use of the existing JVM infrastructure, such as libraries, tools and application servers, makes it also a very practical choice.

This guide will show how to deploy a Clojure application to WildFly - the popular open-source Java application server developed by RedHat. To simplify the deployment process, a suite of libraries called Immutant will be used.

Before You Begin

Familiarize yourself with our Getting Started guide and complete the steps for setting your Linode’s hostname and timezone.
This guide will use sudo wherever possible. Complete the sections of our Securing Your Server to create a standard user account, harden SSH access and remove unnecessary network services.

Update your system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Note
This guide is written for a non-root user. Commands that require elevated privileges are prefixed with sudo. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, you can check our Users and Groups guide.

In this guide example.com will be used as a domain name, and linode-user as a name of non-root user. Substitute your own FQDN and username accordingly.

Install Oracle JDK 8

Add Oracle Java 8 Installer PPA repository to the system. If you are not comfortable with using 3rd-party PPA, please use instructions for manual installation of Oracle Java 8 from Java Development with WildFly on CentOS 7 guide.
```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
```
Update package list and install Oracle JDK 8:
```
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
```
You will be asked twice on screen to agree with “Oracle Binary Code License Agreement for the Java SE Platform Products and JavaFX.” Press Ok button to agree the first time, and Yes button the second time.

Make Oracle Java default:

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-set-default

Check installation by running:

java -version

Output should resemble the following:

java version "1.8.0_66"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_66-b17)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.66-b17, mixed mode)

Install Leiningen

Leiningen is a Clojure project-build tool. Install it system-wide:

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/technomancy/leiningen/stable/bin/lein -O /usr/local/bin/lein
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/lein

To check that installation has been successful, run:
```
lein -v
```
Leiningen will update itself and then will output the version info, which should look similar to the following:
```
Leiningen 2.5.3 on Java 1.8.0_66 Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
```

Create Sample Application

Now, you will create a sample Clojure web application based on Luminus framework.

In your home directory run:
```
lein new luminus clj-app
```
This will create new web application using the Luminus framework application template. It will use immutant as a web server, which is the default option.
To check that everything went smoothly, run the newly created application in development mode:
```
cd clj-app
lein run
```
Now, open http://192.51.100.1:3000/ in your browser (be sure to replace 192.51.100.1 with your Linode’s public IP), and you will see the sample application main page.

Note
Make sure port 3000 is open in firewall for this to work.
Stop the development server by pressing Ctrl-C in console.

Install JBoss WildFly Application Server

Download and unpack the application server archive into /opt/wildfly directory:

export VERSION=9.0.2.Final # Current stable version at the time of writing
cd /opt
sudo wget http://download.jboss.org/wildfly/$VERSION/wildfly-$VERSION.tar.gz
sudo tar xvzf wildfly-$VERSION.tar.gz
sudo mv wildfly-$VERSION wildfly #Get rid of version suffix
sudo rm wildfly-$VERSION.tar.gz

Create a wildfly user and make him the owner of /opt/wildfly:

sudo adduser --system --group --no-create-home --home /opt/wildfly --disabled-login wildfly
sudo chown wildfly -R /opt/wildfly

Copy the WildFly init script to /etc/init.d/ and make wildfly service start on boot:

sudo cp /opt/wildfly/bin/init.d/wildfly-init-debian.sh /etc/init.d/wildfly
sudo update-rc.d wildfly defaults

Start the WildFly service with:
```
sudo service wildfly start
```
Allow linode-user to copy war file into /opt/wildfly/standalone/deployments, which is needed for deployment:
- Add linode-user to wildfly group:
```
sudo usermod linode-user -a -G wildfly
```
- Run newgrp wildfly as linode-user to log in into the new group without logging out:
```
newgrp wildfly
```
- Make sure /opt/wildfly/standalone/deployments belongs to a wildfly group and is writable by the group:
```
sudo chown wildfly.wildfly /opt/wildfly/standalone/deployments/
sudo chmod g+w /opt/wildfly/standalone/deployments
```

Proxy WildFly with Nginx

Install packages for nginx:
```
sudo apt-get install nginx
```

Create file /etc/nginx/sites-available/wildfly with the following content:

/etc/nginx/sites-available/wildfly

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upstream http_backend {
    server 127.0.0.1:8080;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }


    location / {
        proxy_pass http://http_backend;

        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Connection "";

        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/wildfly.access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/wildfly.error.log;
    }
}

Do not forget to substitute example.com with your Linode domain name or public IP address.

Enable your newly created wildfly site and remove the default site to avoid conflicts:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/wildfly /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Restart nginx for changes to take effect:
```
sudo service nginx restart
```

Deploy Sample Application with Immutant

To deploy Clojure application with WildFly you will need to install the Immutant leiningen plugin and configure it for the deployment.

Open project.clj file in clj-app directory and add [lein-immutant "2.1.0"] to the :plugins section of configuration:
/home/linode-user/clj-app/project.clj
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:plugins [[lein-environ "1.0.1"] [lein-immutant "2.1.0"]]
In project.clj and after :plugins, add a new :immutant section with the following content :
/home/linode-user/clj-app/project.clj
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:immutant { :war { :name "ROOT" :destination "/opt/wildfly/standalone/deployments" :context-path "/" } }
This sets three parameters for Immutant installation:
1. The destination folder for the WAR file
2. The context path
3. The WAR file name, which should be ROOT when the context path is /.
Switch to the clj-app directory and deploy the application with:
```
cd ~/clj-app
lein immutant war
```
At this point, you should be able to open your Linode’s domain or IP address in a browser and see the sample application’s main page.

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.

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