Deploy Spring Boot Application with Ease Using Railway.app
Deploying Your Spring Boot Application with Ease Using Railway.app: A Step-by-Step Guide.
With the recent demise of Heroku.com Free tier, as a Spring Boot application developer finding a similar platform has been daunting task. But railway.app has made life much easier for early-stage development or side hustle projects.
In this article, we explore a new Platform named railway.app which helps with the deployment of code to cloud infrastructure without the need to worry about the underlying infrastructure. We as a developer need to take our code, and railway.app would do all the dirty work for us. Right from start via their in-built templates, launch, scale to security all is taken care of. In this blog post, we will how quickly we can bootstrap Spring Boot application into a development(PROD) environment for a side hustle or LIVE project.
Pre-requisite
A railway.app account.
GitHub Account
Java Spring Boot Apps (We will bootstrap one quickly here.)
Bootstrap Spring Boot Web Application
Visit https://start.spring.io/ Just change the Build tool to Maven and add Spring Web dependency.
Rest keep as default and generate the artifact. We are going with JDK17 and Spring Boot v3, won't matter in terms of how this article pans out. Just adding a basic web controller, to download Spring Boot Project to hit the HTTP endpoint once deployed on railway.app
We will test locally once, to see if we get an HTTP response on the exposed Controller.
The next step involves pushing our locally written code to Github. We are pushing to this repository on GitHub. Post push it's time to deploy our code to railway.app
Deploying Spring Boot to railway.app
Login to railway.app account, the best is to do it via github.com
By default, it will allocate you to a Starter plan of usage which gives 500 execution hours or 5$ credit. It will also take you to the dashboard https://railway.app/dashboard
We will now click on Create a New Project. It will list a lot of options to deploy custom, from templates, or use the services out of the box.
We will go ahead with Deploy from GitHub repo, and select Configure GitHub App and select only the required repository. In this case
virendra-oswal-blogsOnce selected, again it will take to New Project, and then Deploy from GitHub repo and select the previously selected Repo shown in UI on the next page as below.
We are selecting our Blog repo as above.
Alright, that's it. Just click Deploy Now as below. (You can set up environment variables if needed in this step or late via settings)
As soon as you trigger, deployment should start and the railway.app is smart enough to know which build tool and project is being built based on Nixpacks it uses.
If you don't have mono-repo, you can jump directly to step 13.
In our case, we are using mono-repo (I wanted to demo this purposefully), so our deployment fails as below
In the mono-repo case, we will update settings to use the Root path as spring-boot-railway-app. As our repo hosts multiple projects across different blogs
Update Root Directory as below to your folder which hosts pom.xml for your spring boot application.
If your repository only hosts a Single Spring Boot app, no need to change Root Directory which defaults to
/As soon as we update, deployment will be triggered. As we can new deployment was successful.
You can click on Successful deployment to view Details, Build Logs and Deploy (Startup) logs as below
Now to access the HTTP endpoint, we must Generate a Domain from the settings of the application as below (You can set up a custom domain too :) )
Once generated, you can your
/greetURI as below
Voila, our Spring boot is LIVE within 5 minutes. With CI/CD already in place with the below trigger already set on a required branch. (master branch in this case)
Resources
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