Spring Boot, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure App Service – Part 1

October 30, 2018Tech Notes , , 3 minsComments Off on Spring Boot, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure App Service – Part 1

I recently played with Java and Azure App Service. What I was trying to find out is how the development experience would look like for Java developers if they want to build their applications with Azure App Service and Azure Database for MySQL.

There are some documents on Microsoft doc site, such as this one. It might be good enough for an experienced Java developer, but for someone like me who has limit Java experience, it is not easy to follow, and the sample is also too simple to make any sense for a real development. So I decided to try it myself and documented my experience here for others to reference. There would be a series of posts, and this is the first one. 

Prepare the dev environment

So instead of installing IntelliJ or Eclipse, I choose to use VSCode as my Java IDE. On my computer I’ve already had the VSCode installed. According to this tutorial, I just need to install JDK and Maven. I am a bit lost with the Java terms like Java SE, JDK, JRE and their versions, but I don’t want to be bothered. I choose to install OpenJDK because Oracle JDK requires a license. So here are steps to install OpenJDK. 

  1. Download OpenJDK from here. Windows version of OpenJDK is a zip file. Unzip it to C:\Program Files\Java so the root fold of the JDK would be something like C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.1
  2. Add an environment variable JAVA_HOME, set its value to the root of the JDK, for example, C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.1
  3. Add C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.1\bin to the system path. 
  4. With the above steps, OpenJDK is installed completely. To test if it works, open a command window and run java -version. It should print out the OpenJDK version and runtime information. 

When OpenJDK is installed, you can follow the vscode tutorial to download and install maven, and the Java Extension Pack for vscode. 

Create a MySQL database

Instead of installing MySQL on my local computer, I choose to create an Azure Database for MySQL instance as the dev database environment. It is easy to provision an Azure Database for MySQL instance. Azure has quick start for it. I also run the following SQL query to configure the database in Azure Cloud Shell. 

CREATE DATABASE tododb; -- Create a database
CREATE USER 'springuser'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'Spring1234'; -- Create a database user
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tododb.* TO 'springuser'@'%'; -- Grant user permissions to the database
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

With the above preparation, we have a Java development environment and a MySQL database ready for the development. In the next post, I will start to create a Spring Boot REST API app with VSCode. Stay tuned.