Micronaut is a state-of-the-art micro web framework targeting the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). I quite like that you can implement your web application oder service using either Java, Groovy or Kotlin – all using micronaut as their foundation.
You can easily tailor it specifically to your own needs and add features as need be. Micronaut Launch provides a great starting point and get you up and running within minutes.
Prepared for Docker
Web services and containers are a perfect match. Containers and their management software eases running and supervising web services a lot. It is feasible to migrate or scale services and run them separately or in some kind of stack.
Micronaut comes prepared for Docker and allows you to build Dockerfiles and Docker images for your application out-of-the-box. The gradle build files of a micronaut application offer handy tasks like dockerBuild or dockerfile to aid you.
A thing that simplifies deploying one service in multiple scenarios is configuration using environment variables (env vars, ENV).
I am a big fan of using environment variables because this basic mechanism is supported almost everywhere: Windows, Linux, docker, systemd, all (?) programming languages and many IDEs.
It is so simple everyone can deal with it and allows for customization by developers and operators alike.
Configuration using environment variables
Usually, micronaut configuration is stored in YAML format in a file called application.yml. This file is packaged in the application’s executable jar file making it ready to run. Most of the configuration will be fixed for all your deployments but things like the database connection settings or URLs of other services may change with each deployment and are most likely different in development.
Gladly, micronaut provides a mechanism for externalizing configuration.
That way you can use environment variables in application.yml while providing defaults for development for example. Note that you need to put values containing : in backticks. See an example of a database configuration below:
datasources:
default:
url: ${JDBC_URL:`jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/supermaster`}
driverClassName: org.postgresql.Driver
username: ${JDBC_USER:db_user}
password: ${JDBC_PASSWORD:""}
dialect: POSTGRES
Having prepared your application this way you can run it using the command line (CLI), via gradle run or with docker run/docker-compose providing environment variables as needed.
# Running the app "my-service" using docker run
docker run --name my-service -p 80:8080 -e JDBC_URL=jdbc:postgresql://prod.databasehost.local:5432/servicedb -e JDBC_USER=mndb -e JDBC_PASSWORD="mnrocks!" my-service
# Running the app using java and CLI
java -DJDBC_URL=jdbc:postgresql://prod.databasehost.local:5432/servicedb -DJDBC_USER=mndb -DJDBC_PASSWORD="mnrocks!" -jar application.jar
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