Cloud Foundry buildpack: Binary Files

A Cloud Foundry buildpack for running arbitrary binary web servers.

Additional information can be found at CloudFoundry.org.

Usage

Unlike most other Cloud Foundry buildpacks, the binary buildpack must be specified in order for it to be used in staging your binary file. You can specify the buildpack your app should use with the -b option for cf push:

cf push my_app -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry/binary-buildpack.git

There are two ways to provide Cloud Foundry with the shell command to execute your binary:

Procfile

Include in your app's root directory a Procfile that specifies a web task:

web: ./app

Command line

Alternatively, you can provide the start command when deploying your app with cf push by including a -c option:

cf push my_app -c './app' -b binary-buildpack

Compiling your Binary

Your binary is expected to bind to the port specified in the PORT environment variable. Here is an example in Go:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, %s", "world!")
}

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
	http.ListenAndServe(":"+os.Getenv("PORT"), nil)
}

Your binary should run without any additional runtime dependencies on the cflinuxfs2 or lucid64 root filesystem (rootfs). Any such dependencies should be statically linked to the binary.

To boot a docker container running the cflinuxfs2 filesystem:

docker run -it cloudfoundry/cflinuxfs2 bash

To boot a docker container running the lucid64 filesystem:

docker run -it cloudfoundry/lucid64 bash

To compile the above Go application on the rootfs, golang must be installed. apt-get install golang and go build app.go will produce an app binary.

When deploying your binary to Cloud Foundry, you can specify the root filesystem it should run against with cf push's -s option flag:

cf push my_app -s (cflinuxfs2|lucid64)

To run docker on Mac OS X, we recommend boot2docker.

Contributing

Find our guidelines here.

Reporting Issues

To report an issue with the buildpack, open an issue on this GitHub repo.