Putting your project on the Internet
In an earlier lecture I showed how you can configure your Spring Boot application to run on the cmsc106.net server that I maintain. You will be doing that for the back end applications that you are going to construct later this term.
For your own personal projects you will want to use a hosting mechanism that you can control. One of the most popular ways to host Spring Boot applications on the Internet is to use Amazon Web Services. Students can get a free account on AWS through the AWS educate program. If you are interested, here is the link to get started.
To demonstrate how to host a Spring Boot application on AWS I went through the process to set up our Auction example on AWS. The notes below will walk you through the complete process I used to do that.
Log in to the console
Once you have an AWS account set up you can log in to your AWS Console. In the top left corner of the window you will see a Services button and a search box. You can use these to search for the services you will need along the way.
Security settings
The first thing you will need to do is to set up some security options on your account. Type IAM into the search box to go to the IAM Dashboard.
Right now the dashboard shows you have 0 user groups and 0 users created.
Click on User groups tab on the left. In User groups click Create group button to create a new group. Name the new group 'admin'. Next, in the Attach permissions policies section type s3 in the search box and then click on the check box next to AmazonS3FullAccess. Then click Create group to create the group.
Click on the Users tab on the left. Click the Create user button. Name the new user and then add this user to the admin group.
Create an RSD instance
Next you will set up an RDS instance to host your MySQL database.
Type RDS in the search box and select the RDS service.
Click the Create database button to make a new RDS database.
Select MySQL as the database type, and select the Free tier option.
Type and confirm a master password in the Credentials Settings section.
In the Public access section click Yes to allow public access to the database.
Click the Create database button at the bottom.
Click the Databases tab in RDS to access your list of databases. Click on the database you just created to go to the details page for this database.
Under Security click on the VPC security group for your database.
In the Security Groups window click on your security group, then click the Edit inbound rules button.
On the next page click the Add rule button. In the new rule select MYSQL/Aurora as the Type and select My IP from the Source menu. Click the Save rules button to save your changes.
Go back to the RDS service and click on your database in the list of databases to bring up the database details page. Copy the Endpoint address to the clipboard.
Start up the MySQL workbench and click the + button on the welcome screen to make a new database connection. Paste the endpoint address into the hostname field and change the user name to 'admin'. Click the Store in Keychain... button and enter the master password you entered when setting up the database.
You can now use the workbench to set up a new database schema and import your database.
I suggest you also create a new user (the student/Cmsc250! username/password combination we have been using works well).
Click the Schema Privileges tab, then click Add Entry to grant access to all schemas. Grant the rights shown here - these are all the rights our user will need:
Click Apply to save your changes.
You can then use the data import screen to import the structure of the database you want to use.
Set up the jar file
Start up the Spring Tools Suite and load your server project. We will need to make one change in the application.properties file. Find the entry that specifies the database url and change localhost to the address of your RDS server.
Next, go to the pom.xml file and add the entry
<packaging>jar</packaging>
if it is not already present there.
Right-click on our project and select Run As/Maven Install. This will build the application jar file. That jar file will appear in the targets folder inside your project folder.
Create an S3 bucket
Now that you have a JAR file you will need to upload it to a place where you can access it from your server later. We will use the S3 storage service to serve up the JAR file when we need it.
Back in AWS, type S3 in the search box to go to the S3 storage service.
Click the Create bucket button. Name your bucket and then create it.
Click on your bucket to view its contents. Click the button to upload a file and select the JAR file to upload.
Create an EC2 server
Finally, we will need to set up a server instance to host our Spring Boot application. We will use EC2 to set up our server.
Type EC2 into the search box to go to the EC2 service.
Click the Launch instance button to create a new server.
Name your server, and set the server type to Ubuntu.
In the Key pair (login) section click the Create new key pair link. Name your key pair, and select the RSA option. After creating the key pair you will get a pem file downloaded in your browser. You will need that file later if you plan to use ssh to connect to your server from your own computer.
Check the 'Create security group' option and also click the options to Allow SSH traffic from Anywhere, and allow HTTPS and HTTP traffic from the internet. You should also add an additional security rule to allow access to port 8085 from anywhere so users can reach your Spring Boot server.
Click the Launch instance button to start up your server.
Under Next Steps you can click the Connect an RDS database button to connect the RDS database you set up earlier.
Set up the server
Once your EC2 server starts up locate it in the list of server instances and click the Connect button to connect to it. Select the EC2 Instance Connect method, check the Connect using EC2 Instance Connect option, and then click the Connect button. This will open a terminal window in your browser that you can use to finish setting up the server.
The first thing we will need to do is to install a JRE on your server. To do this, type the commands
sudo apt update sudo apt install openjdk-21-jre
To be able to copy your jar file from the S3 storage bucket you created earlier you will need to install the AWS CLI application. To this, run these commands:
sudo apt install unzip curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip" unzip awscliv2.zip sudo ./aws/install
Once the app is installed, run the command
aws configure
to configure it. You will be prompted to enter an access key. To create the access key, go to IAM in AWS and select the user you created earlier. Click the Create access key link there. Select the CLI access option and create the access key. Once the access key is created you will be able to copy the access key id and the secret access key that configure command prompts you for.
Now that you have set up access permissions you can copy the jar file from the S3 bucket you created earlier. To do this, type the command
aws s3 cp s3://<bucket-name>/<jar-name>.jar <jar-name>.jar
to download your jar file from the S3 bucket.
Launch your Spring Boot app
To start your Spring Boot server type the command
java -jar <jar-name>.jar&
This will start your server in the background.
You can now use Postman to start sending requests. Remember to replace localhost with the ip address of your server in any requests that you send.