CI-CD for a Standalone Java App

Deploy the Spring PetClinic Application on Amazon Cloud using Github Actions Workflow.

Run Petclinic locally

Spring Petclinic is a Spring Boot application built using Maven or Gradle. You can build a jar file and run it from the command line (it should work just as well with Java 17 or newer):

Create fork of the repository: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-petclinic.git

git clone <your-repository>
cd spring-petclinic
chmod +x mvnw
./mvnw package (to build, test and generate artifacts)
java -jar target/*.jar (starts the application)

You can then access the Petclinic at http://localhost:8080/

cd target
ls
.nvmw test (for running unit tests)

Run Sonarqube analysis locally on java code and check results on Sonarqube dashboard http://<IP-address>:9000

mvn clean verify sonar:sonar \
  -Dsonar.projectKey=<sonarqube-project-name> \
  -Dsonar.projectName='<sonarqube-project-name>' \
  -Dsonar.host.url=<sonarqube-host-url> \
  -Dsonar.token=<your-sonarqube-project-token>

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Now proceed with CI-CD using Githb Actions.

Steps:

• Running the Petclinic App locally to ensure it works as expected (optional)
• Setting up a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline using GitHub Actions to build and test the code using Maven
• Integrating SonarQube for code quality analysis
• Packaging and storing artifacts (JAR files)
• Deploying the JAR file to an AWS EC2 instance

Continuous Integration

• Check out the code
• Build the code using Maven (wrapper included)
• Run tests
• Analyze code quality using SonarQube
• Archive the JAR file as an artifact for later use

Continuous Deployment

The second part of the pipeline (the deploy job) runs after the build job if it’s successful

• Download the JAR artifact from the previous build
• Securely copy (scp) the new JAR to /home/ubuntu on the EC2 instance
• Ensure Java is installed (sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y openjdk-17-jre)
• SSH into the EC2 machine, killing any process that might already be running on port 8080
• Start Spring PetClinic in the background using nohup

Important Notes: Make sure your EC2 instance’s security group allows inbound traffic on port 8080 so that you can reach the PetClinic app in a browser.
In your GitHub repository settings, under “Secrets and variables” → “Actions”, add:
SONAR_HOST_URL, SONAR_TOKEN, EC2_HOST, EC2_PRIVATE_KEY

Verification

After the pipeline finishes, visit:

http://<EC2_PUBLIC_IP_OR_DNS>:8080

You should see the Spring PetClinic landing page. Additionally, log into your SonarQube server http://<sonarqube-EC2-instance-public-ip-or-host>:9000 and verify that the Spring-PetClinic analysis is present.

Troubleshooting

SSH into your EC2 instance manually: ssh -i <your-private-key> <user>@<IP adress>

1. Verify Java is installed and JAR file exists: java -version and ls -l /home/ubuntu/app.jar
2. Run the nohup java -jar command manually: nohup java -jar /home/ubuntu/spring-petclinic-*.jar > app.log 2>&1 &
3. Verify Application running: curl localhost:8080 or ps aux | grep java
4. If not, check the app.log file for any error messages: tail app.log