playframework - Getting started

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Mandla Mbuli

Helloworld

Just go to playframework website

Using the giter8 template sbt new…

  sbt new playframework/play-scala-seed.g8

configured like

  name [play-scala-seed]: playpen
  organization [com.example]: me.mandla
  play_version [3.0.5]: 
  scala_version [2.13.14]: 3.5.0
  sbt_giter8_scaffold_version [0.16.2]:

Then run it with:

sbt run

Nice and easy

Get it to deploy

I use NixOS for running my services. I chose nix because I remembered Ansible being a pain to learn and not having enough Python for my liking. Nix has also been rather difficult to learn and has no Python. It has the advantage that I have more general experience now. My threshold for: “this is impossible” is much higher.

The code runs on Nix, I deploy via SSH using nixops

    stateDiagram-v2
    direction LR
        [*] --> Suifeng
        Suifeng --> NixOps
        NixOps --> Tamayo
        Tamayo --> [*]

Suifeng is my personal laptop Tamayo is the whatever I deploy stateless content to Kochi is whatever I deploy stateful content to

  • nixops
    • Make sure there is multiple ssh keys
    • OCI container (specifically podman)
    virtualisation.oci-containers = 
let
  ngiyeza = import ./ngiyeza/web.nix pkgs;
in
{
  containers = {
    ngiyeza = {
      image = "ngiyeza:latest";
      ports = [ "127.0.0.1:9000:9000" ];
      imageFile = pkgs.dockerTools.buildImage {

        name = "ngiyeza";
        tag = "latest";

        fromImage = pkgs.dockerTools.pullImage {
          imageName = "eclipse-temurin";
          imageDigest = "sha256:b18dabf509aeeb700d9525cdebf6bdbededb06536c6e233a3a21e6fb04d2be8c";
          finalImageName = "eclipse-temurin";
          finalImageTag = "21";
          sha256 = "0aHcVCwAwMQdnXHGlPHtZo2rvzhnhgqhXcjJ5bTfuS0=";
        };
        fromImageName = "eclipse-temurin";
        fromImageTag = "21";

        runAsRoot = ''
          mkdir -p /data
          '';

        config = {
          Cmd = [ "${ngiyeza}/bin/ngiyeza" "-Dconfig.file=${ngiyeza}/conf/production.conf" ];
          WorkingDir = "/data";
          Volumes = { "/data" = { }; };
        };
      };
    };
  };
};

Get it running

Settings


include "application"

play.http.secret.key="super-secret-no-one-can-guess"
play.filters.hosts {
  allowed = ["ngiyeza.mandla.me"]
}
play.server.pidfile.path=/data/RUNNING_PID
  • gitcrypt
    • All protected using git-crypt cause… I am lazy. Setting up things like bitwarden seems like overkill.
  • css does not go through the template engine
    • fonts need to escape @ @@font-face
    • for whatever reason Android doesn’t show the fonts if defined in the file anyway, so defined in a style tag
    • when a URL is needed, it needs to be in the *.scala.html
      ...
  <link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="@routes.Assets.versioned("stylesheets/ngiyeza/main.css")">
  <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/png" href="@routes.Assets.versioned("images/favicon.png")">
  <style>
    @@font-face {
        font-family: "Abel";
        src: url(@routes.Assets.versioned("stylesheets/ngiyeza/fonts/abel/Abel-Regular.ttf"));
    }
    .abel {
      font-family: "Abel", sans-serif;
      font-weight: 400;
      font-style: normal;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body style="background-image: url(@routes.Assets.versioned("images/bg.jpg"))">
    ...

Conclusion

Looks pretty simple and so far, not really Scala yet. The routes thing looks cool The template engine looks cool

Next

Add login.