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Overview

Motivation#

This library offers an alternative way to deploy processes and decisions to Camunda BPM and replaces the default Camunda auto deployment mechanism.

Why would you want to do that? There are mainly two reasons:

  • Camunda's auto deployment cannot handle multi tenant deployments within SpringBoot applications, as it does not properly discover the resources within the repackaged JAR
  • The default way to specify process archives in processes.xml is not as easy and SpringBoot-like as defining it in YAML (which this library allows)

If you want to know more about the issue with SpringBoot, you can read this article on medium.

Activation#

The library configures itself by Spring Autoconfiguration and is enabled by default, if necessary you can still disable the deployment mechanism by adding the following property to your application.yaml:

camunda:
  bpm:
    deployment:
      enabled: false

Note

Make sure you disable Camunda's auto deployment! It is as easy as just deleting the processes.xml.

Configuration#

Instead of processes.xml you have to configure the process archives in your application.yaml:

application.yaml
camunda:
  bpm:
    deployment:
      archives:
        - name: Default
          path: tenants/default
        - name: TenantOne
          tenant: one
          path: tenants/one

If you don't specify a tenant, the tenant within Camunda will be null, which is the Camunda default.

You have to place your resources in a folder structure that matches the specified archives:

src/main/resources
  /tenants
    /default
      - firstProcess.bpmn
    /one
      - secondProcess.bpmn

It is possible that your tenant paths intersect. For example a common scenario is to have the default process application (without tenant) and then introduce a tenant contained in a certain folder at some day. This feature is deactivated by default to prevent misconfiguration and needs to be activated by setting allow-overlapping to true, configuring the archives accordingly. The configuration would look like this:

application.yaml
camunda:
  bpm:
    deployment:
      allow-overlapping: true
      archives:
        - name: Default
          path: # left empty to address the root of the resources folder and all subfolders.
        - name: TenantOne
          tenant: tenant-one
          path: one # subfolder of the root resources folder
As a result, all Camunda relevant files from the root of the classpath src/main/resources and all subdirectories, excluding one are deployed in a default archive (without a tenant). All resources from src/main/resources/one are deployed ina a second archive with tenant tenant-one.

To deploy multiple folders for the same tenant the tenant uniqueness check needs to be disabled:

application.yaml
camunda:
  bpm:
    deployment:
      allow-overlapping: true
      check-tenant-archive-uniqueness: false
      archives:
        - name: BPMN
          path: bpmn
        - name: DMN
          path: dmn