Howdy, this is Gifster !

Gifster is a sample application built on Spring Boot which is ready for being deployed to IBM Bluemix or any other PaaS vendor running on top of Cloud Foundry.

Requirements

• JDK 1.8
• Gradle 3.4.1
• IBM Bluemix Account

Build

This project relies on Gradle as build tool. For getting started, check out the repository and launch Gradle inside the project's root directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/dev4cloud/gifster.git
$ cd gifster/
$ gradle build

Local test

Before deploying the application via Cloud Foundry, make sure the build succeeds and the app can be started locally. Inside the project root, perform the following commands:

$ cd build/libs/
$ java -jar gifster-0.1.0.jar

Assumed that everything works fine, the Spring Boot sample starts listening for incoming connections at localhost:8080.

Deploy to IBM Bluemix

Before you can push your application to IBM Bluemix, make sure you registered and set up your account.
As the next step, download and install the latest version of the Cloud Foundry CLI. We need that to interact with Bluemix on the command line and deploy our application.
As soon as you're done with this, we can finally devote ourselves to get up and running with Bluemix.

1) Set Bluemix API endpoint

First, check the region (US South, Sydney, Germany or UK) you're working on in your profile settings and make Cloud Foundry CLI point to the correct API endpoint:

$ cf api https://api.ng.bluemix.net # point CLI to US South

2) Login to your Bluemix account

Now we need to use the previously installed Cloud Foundry CLI in order to login to our Bluemix account. For that to work, make sure you created at least one single personal organization as well as at least one space to place your application in. You can do this by means of the Bluemix Dashboard. Then, you can login to Bluemix with the Cloud Foundry CLI as follows:

$ cf login -u {username} -o {organization} -s {space}

3) Deploy the Hello-Bluemix application

Enter the project's root directory and launch the following command to deploy the application to Bluemix:

$ cf push -m 1024M -n {hostname} -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack.git 

There's a couple of important points here. First, pay attention to provide sufficient memory to your application. In this case, I chose 1GB, since the JVM allocated about 600MB on startup whilst my local test scenario. If there's not enough memory available, the app won't start.
Second, you have to pass a unique hostname to your application, which is used by Bluemix to provide you with an endpoint where the app can be accessed after deployment.
Last but not least, it's important to make your deployment use the latest version of the Cloud Foundry Java Buildpack. This is necessary since Spring Boot currently does not work with the Java Buildpack version applied by default and instead crashes with java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/context/ApplicationContextInitializer.