A very common way to package and deploy Apereo CAS is via Docker. There are numerous strategies, such as those outlined by this post or this post that can be used to transform an existing CAS overlay into a packaged Docker image. This tutorial focuses on producing Apereo CAS Docker images via the Spring Boot Gradle plugin.

Apereo CAS, as a Spring Boot application, supports building a container from Gradle using the Spring Boot Gradle build plugin. Similar to previous approaches, the most interesting thing about this approach is that you don’t need a Dockerfile. You build the image using the same standard container format as you get from docker build - and it can work in environments where docker is not installed.

This tutorial specifically requires and focuses on:

• CAS 6.3.x
• Java 11
• Docker
• CAS WAR Overlay

Configuration

To get started quickly, the CAS overlay must be modified in small ways to allow the generation of a Docker image. The most important change is to allow the Spring Boot plugin to locate the main application class by including the following dependency in the build:

implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-webapp-init:${casServerVersion}"

Furthermore, it might also be preferable to customize the generated image name and tag:

bootBuildImage {
    imageName = "apereo/cas:${casServerVersion}"
}

The most recent versions of the overlay provide a variant of the Spring Boot Gradle plugin that can create an OCI image using Cloud Native Buildpacks. Images can be built using the bootBuildImage task:

./gradlew clean build bootBuildImage 

It’s important to note that the bootBuildImage task requires access to a Docker daemon. By default, it will communicate with a Docker daemon over a local connection. This works with Docker Engine on all supported platforms without configuration. For additional details, please see the reference documentation.

Need Help?

If you have questions about the contents and the topic of this blog post, or if you need additional guidance and support, feel free to send us a note and ask about consulting and support services.

So…

I hope this review was of some help to you and I am sure that both this post as well as the functionality it attempts to explain can be improved in any number of ways. Please feel free to engage and contribute as best as you can.

Happy Coding,

Misagh Moayyed