About the Play Web Server

The Machine

It's currently named oat-102.cs.uwaterloo.ca and alternatively oat.cs.uwaterloo.ca. It was set up by CSCF. See RT item #85938. It should have advising.uwaterloo.ca pointing to it as well.

Proxies

As originallys set up, oat.cs had minimal connectivity with the rest of the world. It then needed proxies to get software, etc. That caused some problems so Dave Gawley set the machine up as a NAT (with a NAT?). Not sure of the terminology. That removed the need for proxies.

Some of the old notes on proxies, just in case...

• To download Play: wget -e use_proxy=yes -e http_proxy=http-proxy.cs.uwaterloo.ca http://downloads.typesafe.com/play/2.1.1/play-2.1.1.zip
• Play "phones home" when it's run to download the most recent dependencies. To run it through a proxy, export http_proxy=http-proxy.cs.uwaterloo.ca && play Note that this is different than the documentation at http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/Installing.
• The application's source code lives at https://github.com/bwbecker/oat. To get it, git needs to work through the proxy, too. Set up the proxy with git config --global http.proxy $HTTP_PROXY

Play Framework

At the moment we're using Play2.1.2 with a custom mod by Byron that he hopes to get folded into the production version.

1. Clone the git repo: "git clone https://github.com/bwbecker/Play20.git Play20"
2. In Play20/framework, "export http_proxy=https://http-proxy.cs.uwaterloo.ca && ./build"
   1. I'm very confused by whether to use "https://http-proxy..." or just "http-proxy..." I think it's required (hangs if not there) but gives a bogus error message.
3. That will download some initial files and then give a > prompt.
4. At the prompt, say "compile"
5. Then "publish-local"
6. Start the play server with "~/Play20/play" and whatever -D options you need

Certificates

Play! is most comfortable with Java-land certificates. It may handle others, but it certainly defaults to the Java-style keystore. It was difficult finding the expertise for that. What has finally found is encoded in oat/conf/cert/make-keystore, rooted in the oat installation on the web server. It's a script that takes our certificate and key for advising.uwaterloo.ca, the GlobalSign certificates, and builds the keystore.

-- ByronWeberBecker - 2013-06-05