Getting Rolling with Cloud Foundry PAAS

Getting familiar with a PAAS environment for even an experience Java developer can be pretty daunting.  First you need to select a PAAS and then you need to navigate through all of the documentation and try to figure out how to get rolling.  The next couple of posts will detail the steps I took to get rolling with Pivotal's http://pivotal.io Cloud Foundry (Community Edition) http://www.cloudfoundry.org/index.html PAAS.  You are familiar with what a PAAS actually is, you may want to spend a little bit of time reading up on PAAS before proceeding.

Part 1: Connecting To Your Cloud Foundry Instance

The first thing I did was install the Spring Tool Suite (STS) v3.6.3-SR1 https://spring.io/tools/sts/all on my MAC running Yosemite OS X 10.10.  Make sure you download and install the right version for your development system.

Note: Also a system requirement for STS 3.6.x was to have at least JDK7 running on your system.  I am currently running Java 8 update 40 on my MAC.  If you do not have at least Java 7 installed, install an appropriate version before proceeding. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

After installing the STS I ran into the known problem where the GateKeeper prevents you from running the non App Store downloaded application.  You need to go into System Preferences --> Security & Privacy and change to "Allow apps from anywhere".

The next step was to install the Cloud Foundry Plugin for Eclipse.  I figured the easy way to do this wast from the marketplace.  You navigate to Help -> Eclipse Marketplace from within STS.  You then enter Cloud Foundry into the search field and click search.  In the results panel find the "Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse" plugin.  At the current time the version for the plugin was 1.8.  Click the Install button, review the components of the plugin, accept licensing terms, and then wait for the plugin to install.  After the plugin install you will be required to restart STS.

Configure Connection

From within the "Server" View of STS, right mouse click and select New --> Server. From the dialog select Cloud Foundry.  Provide a name in the "Server Name" field and then click "Next".

On the next screen you will be asked for your Cloud Foundry account information.  If you do not have an account you will need to register for an account first at https://console.run.pivotal.io/register .

On the next dialog you will enter your account (email address) and password 

Once you enter your account and password, click the "Validate Account" to make sure everything is specified appropriately,  If it isn't, you will receive a corresponding validation error.  If it passes without error, you can then click "Next".  Your corresponding organization and spaces will be displayed to you.  Select the space you want to target (note: you may only have one space available) and can click "Finish" to wrap up the new server setup.  You may be prompted and informed that a new master password has been setup and asked if you want to provide more information in case you need to recover the master password.  I would suggest you indicate yes and then proceed to set up your security question / answer pairs.

Now at this point you should have successful configured a connection from STS to your cloud foundry instance.  The server should now appear in your server view within STS.  You are now ready to begin exploring the deployment of applications both locally to your Cloud Foundry instance.  I will cover deployment of a sample application in my next post.