doytsujin / gaffer

Gaffer - Foreman on JVM

gaffer

Foreman on JVM. It manages Procfile-based applications.

Requirement

gaffer requires Java 1.7.0 or greater to run and develop.

Installation

Homebrew

If you're running OSX, you could:

$ brew tap jingweno/gaffer
$ brew install gaffer

Precompiled Packages

Download the latest release and unzip it.

Compile from Source

To compile gaffer from source, you'll need to have maven installed, and then run:

$ mvn package
$ unzip target/gaffer-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-dist.zip -d target
$ ./target/gaffer-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-dist/bin/gaffer help

Procfile

A Procfile should contain both a name for the process and the command used to run it. For example:

$ cat Procfile
web: bundle exec thin start
job: bundle exec rake jobs:work

A process name may contain letters, numbers and the underscore character.

Usage

$ gaffer start
$ gaffer start web
$ gaffer start -f Procfile.test -c worker=2
$ gaffer run java -jar target/hello-world-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar server

Implementation

gaffer takes advantage of akka's actors to supervise child-processes. More details to come as a blog post.

Why

gaffer does almost the same thing as foreman. However, it empowers existing JVM build tools to manage Procfile-like applications. To give you a taste on what I'm working on, assuming you declare the following in Maven's pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>com.owenou</groundId>
  <artifactId>maven-gaffer</artifactId>
  <processes>
    <process>
      <name>web</name>
      <main>web.Main</main>
    </process>
    <process>
      <name>job</name>
      <shell>./bin/job start</shell>
    </process>
  </processes>
</plugin>

Running mvn gaffer:start will start all the processes associated with your app just as you run it from the gaffer CLI.

Roadmap

• maven plugin
• gradle plugin

License

See License.md.