Vert.x 3 init.d Script

Let’s say you have a Vert.x 3 ap­pli­ca­tion you want to in­stall on a Linux server. But you want the old school way (I mean not the Docker way ☺). So, in other words, you need an init.d script. This post pro­poses an init.d script that you can use to start/stop/restart a Vert.x 3 ap­pli­ca­tion.

Prerequisites

The pro­posed script as­sumes your ap­pli­ca­tion is pack­aged as a fat jar. So, your ap­pli­ca­tion is going to be launched using java -jar your-fat-jar ....

The script

The init.d scripts have to reply to a set of com­mands:

• start : starts the ap­pli­ca­tion (if not yet started)
• stop : stops the ap­pli­ca­tion (if started)
• status : let you know if the ap­pli­ca­tion is started or not
• restart : restart the ap­pli­ca­tion

These com­mands are in­voked using:

service my-service-script start
service my-service-script stop
service my-service-script status
service my-service-script restart

In gen­eral, ser­vice scripts are hooked in the boot and shut­down se­quences to start and stop au­to­mat­i­cally dur­ing the sys­tem starts and stops.

So, enough talks, let’s look at the script:

Using the script

First down­load the script from the here.

You need to set a cou­ple of vari­ables lo­cated at the be­gin­ning of the file:

# The directory in which your application is installed
APPLICATION_DIR="/opt/my-vertx-app"
# The fat jar containing your application
APPLICATION_JAR="maven-verticle-3.0.0-fat.jar"
# The application argument such as -cluster -cluster-host ...
APPLICATION_ARGS=""
# vert.x options and system properties (-Dfoo=bar).
VERTX_OPTS=""
# The path to the Java command to use to launch the application (must be java 8+)
JAVA=/opt/java/java/bin/java

The rest of the script can stay as it is, but feel free to adapt it to your needs. Once you have set these vari­ables based on your en­vi­ron­ment, move the file to /etc/init.d and set it as ex­e­cutable:

sudo mv my-vertx-application /etc/init.d
sudo chmod +x my-vertx-application

Then, you should be able to start your ap­pli­ca­tion using:

sudo service my-vertx-application start

De­pend­ing to your op­er­at­ing sys­tem, adding the hooks to the boot and shut­down se­quence dif­fers. For in­stance on Ubuntu you need to use the update-rc.d com­mand while on Cen­tOS chkconfig is used

That’s all, enjoy !