It was a privilege and honor to give a talk at last month’s (first (clojure-conj)) on a topic that is often a pain point for many Clojure developers and teams, the continuous deployment of Clojure web applications.

Based on discussions I’ve had with Clojure developers over the past year or two, it seems that many (if not most) find the domain of application deployment to be incredibly complicated (it is), populated with too many potential “solutions” to choose from (there are), of which few seem to provide gentle on-ramps for new users (it’s true). My talk was probably the least technical and most high-level of the conference, but based on the feedback I’ve heard so far (crazy selection bias in play!), many people seem to have come away from it with a better grasp on the problem overall, and perhaps some reasonably concrete potential paths to sanity.

Here are the slides from that talk (download/view as PDF):

(Special credit goes to Brian Carper, who was a good enough sport to allow me to call out his clever/scary app deployment architecture based on emacs, swank, screen, apache, mod_proxy, and jetty as the ultimate example of what not to do. ;-))

One of those paths is a Clojure-based toolchain, provided primarily by pallet and jclouds (which I’ve mentioned before). If you’re already a Clojure programmer, it’s a very easy option to slip into compared to, say, Chef or Puppet. I provided an outline of using pallet and jclouds in my high-level talk, but I wanted to provide an addendum to that with a very detailed, step-by-step introduction to them, along with how one can “close the loop” on continuous deployment using the Hudson continuous integration server.

I figured I’d knock out a short-ish screencast, but quickly discovered that there was way more material than I anticipated…and ended up with a 50-minute screencast that provides a bunch of background on pallet and jclouds, walks through a basic web application build and deployment process, and sets up Hudson from scratch to drive the whole thing. In hindsight, the whole thing may be far too long (and maybe too introductory?) for most people’s tastes; in any case, I do hope some find it helpful.

Please heed the disclaimer included in the sample project:

…what is contained herein and discussed in the screencast is by no means an ideal web application deployment process. It is only meant to be an easy-to-understand first step into using pallet, jclouds, and Hudson. You are strongly encouraged to learn about these tools and customize (or likely replace) this basic approach for your own needs.

Without any further ado, here’s the sample project repository:

http://github.com/cemerick/clojure-web-deploy-conj

and the accompanying screencast (or watch in HD on Vimeo):

As an aside, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the excellent introduction to pallet that Nate Young posted just yesterday.

Finally, here are some links to additional resources you may find helpful if you do decide to start using jclouds and pallet for your application deployments: