Deployment

This section expands the process of deploying in a production environment. Make sure you are familiarized with the installation procedure first before attempting the described steps.

Web server

There a few options you will likely want to specify when deploying your RDP instance.

Server port

Set server.port in application.propeties to adjust the port the embedded webserver is listening on.

server.port=8080

Fast random number generation

Specify -Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/urandom this if you receive logs such as:

Creation of SecureRandom instance for session ID generation using [SHA1PRNG] took [235,853] milliseconds. The secure random calls may be blocking as there is not enough entropy to feed them in /dev/random.

Proxy configuration

Set -Dhttp.proxyHost and -Dhttp.proxyPort to perform HTTP accesses through a proxy.

Likewise, you can set up a proxy for FTP connections with -Dftp.proxyHost and -Dftp.proxyPort.

General steps

  1. Create a working directory for the web service: mkdir -p /project/directory
  2. Move into that directory: cd /project/directory
  3. Download the latest release: wget -O rdp-1.5.10.jar https://github.com/PavlidisLab/rdp/releases/download/v1.5.10/rdp-1.5.10.jar
  4. Create application.properties, and optionally faq.properties and messages.properties if you want to customize messages.
  5. Test your setup: java -jar rdp-1.5.10.jar
  6. Log into the database and activate other model and organ systems (optional)
  7. Deploy using systemd or a Docker container

Integration with systemd

If you are not using a container technology such as Docker, we recommend that you use a systemd service unit to deploy your RDP instance.

Create a file under /etc/systemd/system/rdp.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=rdp
After=syslog.target

[Service]
User=tomcat
Group=tomcat
WorkingDirectory=/project/directory
ExecStart=/bin/java -Xms256m -Xmx3g -jar rdp-1.5.10.jar
SuccessExitStatus=143

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  • Start service: systemctl start rdp.service
  • View logs: journalctl -f -u rdp.service

Apache

Create a standard virtual host section with the following proxies:

ProxyPass / http://localhost:<port>/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:<port>/

For more information on Spring application deployment, read Deploying Spring Boot Applications from their official docs.