Spring boot gives you the possibility to package your application as an executable jar. This jar includes your code, all dependencies plus an embedded application server. Since spring boot 1.3 this jar also works as an init script which can be linked to /etc/init.d to have your application started and stopped automatically on boot / shutdown.

This approach has some benefits:

• no need to write an init script or use of supervisord

• updating the application server, per default tomcat, is as simple as setting the version in your pom:

    <tomcat.version>8.0.33</tomcat.version>
  

• very easy to [switch to a different application server] (http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/howto-embedded-servlet-containers.html#howto-use-jetty-instead-of-tomcat) e.g. in case of a security issue in tomcat

The application will run as the user who owns the jar, will create a pid to track it's state and log to /var/log/. Have a look at the spring boot documentation, too.

To get you started as fast as possible, I created this demo project which will bundle a debian package via jdeb.

The package will:

• add a system group and a matching user following your artifactId as names
• create needed default folders
• set permissions properly
• follow spring boot's security guidelines which meas that:
  • the user will not be able to log into your system
  • the jar will only be readable and executable (not writable) by the created user

Note: the user, the group and the service will take the name of your mvn artifactId.

You may build and install your own debian package into a vagrant box now.

Install vagrant, virtualbox, maven

mvn clean package

after that you are good to fire up the vagrant box which will install java and the deb package automatically:

vagrant up

Feel free to play around now and when you are done delete your vagrant VM via vagrant destroy.

Patches and comments are welcome.