Camunda war file deployment with bpmn only

Question

New to camunda here. I am thinking of maintaining the war files (i.e. the bpmn files, forms and the code for them) in the same repo as my backend application and have their deployment automated with merges to master, so as a new version of the workflows is merged to master, it also gets zipped in a war file and deployed. I wonder if war files can contain a bpmn and its forms only with no java code in case that particular workflow doesn't really need java code to be completed?

Answer 1

Since you did not provide us with enough information about your Camunda Stack this answer might be too generic.

According to the official Camunda documentation you basically have two deployment options:

• Deploy to Camunda (discussed later in this answer)
  • Deploy via process application (application containing your process(es) which can be deployed as .jar/.war to your application service that contains the process engine.
  • Use REST API
• Deploy with Camunda - (all artifacts are in a single location, typically a spring boot application, and the processes are found and deployed on the application startup because this is a straightforward approach, I won't further discuss this option)

Process application

You can of course have a .war deployment file containing only forms and .bpmn (or .dmn) files. You can check the following simple example of .war deployment to shared container-managed process engine via a separate process application.

REST API

If you have access to your Camunda REST API you could also consider deploying through /engine-rest/deployment/create endpoint (documentation and specification of the endpoint can be found here).

If you plan to automate the process of process deployment, I also provide a script we use in our Gitlab CI/CD pipeline to deploy the process. We keep the processes (.bpmn, .dmn, .js and forms) in separate repository, with the following structure:

• Process repository
  • definitions/ - .bpmn and .dmn files
  • scripts/ - javascript files needed for script tasks or listeners
  • forms/ - JSON forms we use for our custom build user task forms

Our case will probably be different than yours, but the script can be adjusted to your particular needs or serve as an inspiration:

#!/bin/bash

SCRIPT=`realpath $0`
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

if [ -z "$CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_ENDPOINT" ]; then # LOCAL DEPLOYMENT ENDPOINT WON'T BE SET
  CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:8080/engine-rest/deployment/create"
fi

if [ -z "$CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_NAME" ]; then # OPTIONAL: YOU CAN NAME THE DEPLOYMENT VIA ENV VARIABLE
  CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_NAME="rest-deployment"
fi

# FAIL THE SCRIPT WHEN CREDENTAILS ARE NOT SET
if [ -z "$CREDENTIALS_USERNAME" ]; then
  echo "Error: Username not set, please set the CREDENTIALS_USERNAME env variable."
  exit 1;
fi
if [ -z "$CREDENTIALS_PASSWORD" ]; then
  echo "Error: Password not set, please set the CREDENTIALS_PASSWORD env variable."
  exit 1;
fi

ENCODED_CREDENTIALS=$(echo -n "$CREDENTIALS_USERNAME:$CREDENTIALS_PASSWORD" | base64)

echo "Deploying to $CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_ENDPOINT"

CURL_OPTS="curl --write-out '%{http_code}' --show-error --fail --silent --request POST --url $CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_ENDPOINT --header 'Authorization: Basic $ENCODED_CREDENTIALS' --header 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data' --header 'content-type: multipart/form-data;' --form deployment-name=$CAMUNDA_DEPLOYMENT_NAME "

if [ -z "$(ls -A scripts/)" ]; then
   echo "Empty scripts folder"
else
   while read -r file; do
    echo "Adding following javascript source: $file"
    name=${file##*/}
    CURL_OPTS+="--form $name=@$SCRIPTPATH/$file "
    done<<< "$(find scripts/ -type f -print)"
fi

if [ -z "$(ls -A definitions/)" ]; then
   echo "Empty definitions folder"
else
while read -r file; do
    echo "Adding following process definition source: $file"
    name=${file##*/}
    CURL_OPTS+="--form $name=@$SCRIPTPATH/$file "
done<<< "$(find definitions/ -type f -print)"
fi

if [ -z "$(ls -A forms/)" ]; then
   echo "Empty forms folder"
else
while read -r file; do
    echo "Adding following form file: $file"
    name=${file##*/}
    CURL_OPTS+="--form $name=@$SCRIPTPATH/$file "
done<<< "$(find forms/ -type f -print)"
fi

echo "Executing deployment request:"
echo "------------------------------"

echo "RESPONSE:"
echo "------------------------------"
echo "$CURL_OPTS"
response=$(eval "$CURL_OPTS")
echo "------------------------------"
echo "$response";

I hope you can find any of this useful. You can find many sources on each of the approaches.