Deploying a Play application into Cloud Foundry

A week or so ago some colleagues gave a brief introduction to the local Cloud Foundry environment.

One of the main takeaways for me was that our application would need to be able to bind to a TCP port specified at runtime rather than have a statically defined one from a config file.

We spent some time looking into how to tell Play to listen on a provided port, and what might be involved in setting up a Cloud Foundry manifest file - then decided to just try deploying with something that we expected to fail.

We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the Java buildpack included enough logic to detect our application as being a Play application and looked after the port binding for us.

It wasn't a completely smooth process, as we did have to update the JDK version in the buildpack - which involved forking the Cloud Foundry github repository.  Three lines of text changes was enough to get it up and running.