Grails Deployment - Fastest way to get deployed?

Question

Hi All,

If anyone has or is running a Grails application on their server I would appreciate some details on where to go after creating the WAR.

Background

I chose grails because with Google App Engine and the App Engine Plugin deployment should have been trivial. This issue is that there is a bug which makes any application pretty much unusable, I wish this had been more prominent so I didn't have to get to the point of seeing the error myself before I was aware of it.

The next option was EC2 and the Cloud Tools plugin, it seems Cloud Tools worked with grails 1.0 but doesn't work with the current 1.2.1 due to issues getting the JAR dependencies. It also seems that Cloud Tools has been succeeded by Cloud Foundry which is in beta, will cost extra money and has limited places (I signed up but haven't got an e-mail).

Question

My application is painfully trivial, it has a small load, small data requirements and doesn't need to scale past 5 users.

How can I deploy my grails app as quickly and painlessly as possible?

Specifically:

• Are there any hosting companies that have tomcat installed on their servers out of the box that I can sign up to and use that will just work?
• Do you know of any simple tutorials for getting a grails application deployed to EC2 without Cloud Tools?

Thanks in advance,

Gav

Side-note: I picked grails because of good advice from SO, it should have been a very short time from development to deployed product except the tools for auto-deployment aren't that mature and I've never configured a server before.

Answer 1

We are running ShareYourLove.com via CloudFoundry and it works well. It doesn't cost us any extra over the standard EC2 rates.

The best option (if you haven't received a CF login yet) is to buy a low cost linux box like http://www.linode.com and install tomcat and mysql yourself.

cheers

Lee

Answer 2

I use slicehost, they have very straightforward instructions for installing postgresql/mysql and tomcat is pretty easy to install.

Answer 3

You made a good choice picking Grails; if you have your app running on your local machine, it's straightforward to deploy it to EC2. Even if you don't have a CloudFoundry account, you should still be able to use the open source Cloud Tools and AMIs to deploy your app to EC2. If you need any help with EC2, post a comment and I'll add some useful links.

Answer 4

http://mor.ph/ supports grails apps, has no up-front costs and supports both PostgreSQL and MySQL.