Use-case and Deployment Scenarios
How can I use and deploy Akka?
Akka can be used in two different ways:
- As a library: used as a regular JAR on the classpath and/or in a web app, to be put into WEB-INF/lib
- As a microkernel: stand-alone microkernel, embedding a servlet container along with many other services
Using Akka as library
This is most likely what you want if you are building Web applications. There are several ways you can use Akka in Library mode by adding more and more modules to the stack.
Actors as services
The simplest way you can use Akka is to use the actors as services in your Web application. All that’s needed to do that is to put the Akka charts as well as its dependency jars into WEB-INF/lib. You also need to put the akka.conf config file in the $AKKA_HOME/config directory. Now you can create your Actors as regular services referenced from your Web application. You should also be able to use the Remoting service, e.g. be able to make certain Actors remote on other hosts. Please note that remoting service does not speak HTTP over port 80, but a custom protocol over the port is specified in akka.conf.
Using Akka as a stand alone microkernel
Akka can also be run as a stand-alone microkernel. It implements a full enterprise stack. See the Add-on Modules for more information.
Using the Akka sbt plugin to package your application
The Akka sbt plugin can create a full Akka microkernel deployment for your sbt project.
To use the plugin, first add a plugin definition to your SBT project by creating project/plugins/Plugins.scala with:
import sbt._
class Plugins(info: ProjectInfo) extends PluginDefinition(info) {
val akkaRepo = "Akka Repo" at "https://repo.akka.io/releases"
val akkaPlugin = "se.scalablesolutions.akka" % "akka-sbt-plugin" % "1.3.1"
}
Then mix the AkkaKernelProject trait into your project definition. For example:
class MyProject(info: ProjectInfo) extends DefaultProject(info) with AkkaKernelProject
This will automatically add all the Akka dependencies needed for a microkernel deployment (download them with sbt update).
Place your config files in src/main/config.
To build a microkernel deployment use the dist task:
sbt dist
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