Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Virgo in the Cloud: a CloudFoundry buildpack

The recent Virgo community survey showed quite a bit of interest in running Virgo in the cloud. With CloudFoundry's forthcoming "buildpack" support, this was relatively easy to achieve.

A Virgo buildpack is available on github - see the README for detailed information. It currently supports two types of application: web applications or "overlays". A web application may be a standard WAR file or an OSGi Web Application Bundle. An overlay is a pair of directories -- pickup for the application(s) to be deployed and repository/usr for any additional dependencies not already provided by Virgo -- which are placed in an instance of Virgo Server for Apache Tomcat.

The support for buildpacks should ship later this month - see the CloudFoundry roadmap.