Portable App Distribution for Cloud Foundry

Introduction

Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of applications, abstracting away the underlying infrastructure. On-premise deployment, conversely, involves hosting applications and their entire infrastructure within a company's own data centers, giving them full control.

This documentation provides guidance on understanding Cloud Foundry on-premise deployments and serves as a helpful reference rather than official implementation support.

Prerequisites

To deploy your app to an on-premises Cloud Foundry configuration using Portable App Distribution, ensure that you fulfill the following prerequisites:

• You have access to the Cloud Foundry organization and space where the application is deployed.
• You have access to the database configuration from the database service.
• You have access to binding other required Cloud Foundry services.
• The Cloud Foundry CLI is installed.
• You have generated the Portable App Distribution .zip file.

Deploying an App with Portable App Distribution

To deploy your app to Cloud Foundry, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to Cloud Foundry, and then access the organization and space where the application is deployed.

2. Save the Portable App Distribution .zip file to an accessible location.

3. Create a manifest.yml file in the root directory of your app.

   By default, the cf push command uses the manifest.yml file in the app directory. To specify a different location for the manifest, you must pass its local path to the -f flag when you run cf push.

4. Add the following content to the file:

   applications:
   - name: <the name of your app>
     path: <the path where you saved your .zip file>
     memory: 
     buildpacks:
     services:
     env:

   An example manifest file can look like the following:

   applications:
   - name: mx-java-app
     path: <path-to-zip>
       memory: 1G
       buildpacks:
       - java_buildpack
       services:
       - <service instance_id to be bind>
       - <service instance_id to be bind>
       env:
         JBP_CONFIG_OPEN_JDK_JRE: '{ jre: { version: 21.+}}'
         JBP_LOG_LEVEL: INFO 
         JAVA_OPTS: >
           -Xmx512m
           -Xms512m
           -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=20M
           -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=128M        
      ``` 

5. Run the cf push command.

6. Verify that the Mendix app has started successfully.