How to start a long running process using AWS CodeDeploy hooks?

Question

I have an appspec file where I am trying to start a long running Java service in an EC2 instance using AWS Code Deploy. But it seems the code deploy agent expects the script to eventually exit which won't happen for such a service unless I kill the service or perform a redeploy. And not exiting the command eventually fails the deployment.

Here is what my appspec.yml looks like
```
version: 0.0
os: linux
files:
  - source: /
    destination: /home/ubuntu/app
hooks:
  ApplicationStart:
    - location: bin/start-service.sh
      runas: ubuntu
```

And the contents of my start-service.sh looks like:
```
java -jar /home/ubuntu/app/target/app.jar 
```
which will not exit until I redeploy. How do I make the deployment succeed for such a service?

Answer

Hello,

To be able to make a long process run is by configuring something like this

-->java -jar /home/ubuntu/app/target/app.jar  > /dev/null 2> /dev/null < /dev/null &[1]

The reason for this being CodeDeploy doesn't like if process run in background
and  this will send it to null giving some code and CodeDeploy will pass the script

Reference:

[1]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codedeploy/latest/userguide/troubleshooting-deployments.html#troubleshooting-long-running-processes

How to start a long running process using AWS CodeDeploy hooks?

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