Standing Up a Local Netflix Eureka

Here I will consider two different ways of standing up a local instance of Netflix Eureka. If you are not familiar with Eureka, it provides a central registry where (micro)services can register themselves and client applications can use this registry to look up specific instances hosting a service and to make the service calls.

Approach 1: Native Eureka Library

The first way is to simply use the archive file generated by the Netflix Eureka build process:

1. Clone the Eureka source repository here: https://github.com/Netflix/eureka
2. Run "./gradlew build" at the root of the repository, this should build cleanly generating a war file in eureka-server/build/libs folder
3. Grab this file, rename it to "eureka.war" and place it in the webapps folder of either tomcat or jetty. For this exercise I have used jetty.
4. Start jetty, by default jetty will boot up at port 8080, however I wanted to instead bring it up at port 8761, so you can start it up this way, "java -jar start.jar -Djetty.port=8761"

The server should start up cleanly and can be verified at this endpoint - "http://localhost:8761/eureka/v2/apps"

Approach 2: Spring-Cloud-Netflix

Spring-Cloud-Netflix provides a very neat way to bootstrap Eureka. To bring up Eureka server using Spring-Cloud-Netflix the approach that I followed was to clone the sample Eureka server application available here: https://github.com/spring-cloud-samples/eureka

1. Clone this repository
2. From the root of the repository run "mvn spring-boot:run", and that is it!.

The server should boot up cleanly and the REST endpoint should come up here: "http://localhost:8761/eureka/apps". As a bonus, Spring-Cloud-Netflix provides a neat UI showing the various applications who have registered with Eureka at the root of the webapp at "http://localhost:8761/".

Just a few small issues to be aware of, note that the context url's are a little different in the two cases "eureka/v2/apps" vs "eureka/apps", this can be adjusted on the configurations of the services which register with Eureka.

Conclusion

Your mileage with these approaches may vary. I have found Spring-Cloud-Netflix a little unstable at times but it has mostly worked out well for me. The documentation at the Spring-Cloud site is also far more exhaustive than the one provided at the Netflix Eureka site.