Community Tutorials

Run a Kotlin Spring Boot app on App Engine standard environment

Author(s): @bshaffer , Published: 2018-09-21

Brent Shaffer | Developer Programs Engineer | Google

Contributed by Google employees.

App Engine standard environment deploys your apps to the same infrastructure that powers Google's products. In this tutorial you'll see how to deploy your Kotlin and Spring Boot application to App Engine standard environment.

You will create a new Spring Boot application, and then you will learn how to:

Deploy your application
Update your application

While the tutorial uses Kotlin 1.2 and Spring Boot 2 M7, other releases of Kotlin and Spring Boot should work without any modifications (other than version numbers in Maven files). This tutorial does assume you're familiar with Spring Boot and creating web applications. For simplicity the tutorial responds with JSON to a specific HTTP request, but can be built-on to connect to other Google services and/or databases.

Before you begin

Before running this tutorial, you must set up a Google Cloud Platform project, and you need to have the Google Cloud SDK installed.

Create a project that will host your Spring Boot application. You can also reuse an existing project.

Use the Cloud Console to create a new Google Cloud project. Remember the project ID; you will need it later. Later commands in this tutorial will use [PROJECT_ID] as a substitution, so you might consider setting the PROJECT_ID environment variable in your shell.
Enable billing for your project.
Install the Cloud SDK. Make sure you initialize the SDK and set the default project to the new project you created.

Version 175.0.0 or later of the SDK is required.
Install JDK 8 or higher if you do not already have it.
Install Maven.

Creating a new app and running it locally

In this section, you will create a new Spring Boot app and make sure it runs. If you already have an app to deploy, you can use it instead.

Alternatively, you can download the sample application.

Use start.spring.io to generate a Spring Boot application.
- Select Kotlin as the language and Maven as the build system.
- Using the Dependency selector, type GCP Support and select it.
- In the same Dependency selector, type Web and select first result.
- Click "Switch to the full version" at the bottom to expand the advanced options. Under Packaging select War in the dropdown.
Click the Generate Project button to download the generated Spring Boot application and save it to a local folder.

Open the downloaded application folder in your favourite IDE or editor an create a new source file MessageController.kt in the directory src/main/kotlin with the following contents:

package com.example.demo

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController

data class Message(val text: String, val priority: String)

@RestController
class MessageController {
    @RequestMapping("/message")
    fun message(): Message {
        return Message("Hello from Google Cloud", "High")
    }
}

The package should match that of the groupId and artifactId specified in pom.xml.

Edit the file named DemoApplication.kt in src/main/kotlin and replace its contents with the contents of the following example DemoApplication.kt file.
Run the application from the command line using Maven:
```
mvn spring-boot:run
```
Open the browser and make sure you get a valid JSON response when accessing http://localhost:8080/message. The result should be:
```
{
  "text": "Hello from Google Cloud",
  "priority": "High"
}
```

Deploy your application

To deploy your application, you will use an App Engine plugin for Maven which simplifies some of the process. The plugin is also available for Gradle.

Create a file called appengine-web.xml in a new folder src/main/webapp/WEB-INF with the contents of the following example appengine-web.xml file.
Add this plugin entry to the plugins section of your pom.xml file to configure the Google Cloud Maven plugin.
Run the following command to deploy your app:
```
mvn appengine:deploy
```
If this is the first time you have deployed to App Engine in this project, gcloud will prompt you for a region. You may choose the default of "us-central", or select a region close to your location.

Deployment will also take a few minutes to requisition and configure the needed resources, especially the first time you deploy.

Note: If the command fails with Google Cloud SDK could not be found, make sure the environment variable GOOGLE_CLOUD_SDK_HOME is set to the root directory of where you installed the Cloud SDK.
Once the deploy command has completed, you can run the following to see your app running in production on App Engine in the browser:
```
gcloud app browse
```
This application does not respond to the root endpoint. Once the browser is open with the correct URL, you need to append /message to it.

Update your application

Make a simple change and redeploy.

Change the text returned from the message() function to

"Hello from App Engine"
Run the deployment command again:
```
mvn appengine:deploy
```
View your changes live by running:
```
gcloud app browse
```
Remember to add /message to the URL.

Clean up

After you've finished this tutorial, you can clean up the resources you created on Google Cloud so you won't be billed for them in the future. To clean up the resources, you can delete the project or stop the App Engine service.

Deleting the project

The easiest way to eliminate billing is to delete the project you created for the tutorial. To do so using gcloud, run:

gcloud projects delete [PROJECT_ID]

where [PROJECT_ID] is your Google Cloud project ID.

Warning: Deleting a project has the following consequences:

If you used an existing project, you'll also delete any other work you've done in the project. You can't reuse the project ID of a deleted project. If you created a custom project ID that you plan to use in the future, you should delete the resources inside the project instead. This ensures that URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, remain available.

Stopping App Engine services

To disable an App Engine service:

In the Cloud Console, go to the App Engine Versions page.
Make sure your project is selected. If necessary, pull down the project selection dropdown at the top, and choose the project you created for this tutorial.
If you deployed to a service other than "default", you can navigate to the Services page, select the service you want to remove, and click Delete.
If you have multiple versions running, you can navigate to the Versions page, select your version and click Split Traffic to migrate all traffic away from the version you want to stop. Once your version is serving zero traffic, select it and click Stop or Delete.
If you want to stop App Engine entirely, you can navigate to the Settings page and click Disable Application.

Next steps

See the App Engine documentation for more information on App Engine features including scaling, health checks, and infrastructure customization.

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