basic init script for a play application running on centos

When deploying a play app, you might need to make it a service so that it automatically starts after a reboot for example.

On a CentOS server, you can write a bash script in /etc/init.d and enable it with chkconfig.

This is my take on writing a -hopefully- generic script that should work for most play applications (tested with 2.3.2). It relies on the fact that plays automatically creates a file containing its pid within its own folder (you can always change the location of that pid file if you need to).

I am also assuming that the application has been package with the dist command. In my case, jenkins build it with clean universal:package-zip-tarball and copies over the tgz file to the server. The resulting folder (after extracting the files) is where the init script will point at. It looks like this:

To make it work for another play app, it should only be a matter of updating the parameters in the first 4 lines.

Note that I use DAEMON_OPTS to pass it production server specific options such as configuration files, e.g.:

DAEMON_OPTS="-Dconfig.resource=prod.conf -Dlogger.resource=prod-logger.xml"