A single app in Cloud Foundry can consist of multiple processes running in separate containers. This is different from the sidecar processes we looked at earlier, which share a single container.

One of the most common use cases for multiple processes is a web app that has both a UI process and a worker process.

Push an App with Multiple Processes

An app with multiple processes can be pushed by either passing a Procfile to cf push, or by declaring the multiple processes in the app manifest. We’ll start by trying the Procfile approach.

Passing Procfiles to cf push

To push an app that creates multiple processes from the same codebase, you list each process in the manifest. Here, you need to specify a start command for each process as the buildpack won’t know how to distinguish between each process.

---
applications:
- name: multi-process
  buildpacks:
  - nodejs_buildpack
  processes:
  - type: web
    instances: 1
    memory: 64M
    command: node main.js web
  - type: worker
    instances: 2
    memory: 32M
    command: node main.js worker

Note: You can also specify start commands by providing a Procfile. If you’d like to learn more about Procfiles we recommend taking a look at the Cloud Foundry API documentation.

Let’s try pushing the multi-process app.

cf push --random-route

You should now be able to view the running processes on the app:

cf app multi-process

You should see the details of your running processes in the output. By default, the web process has a route and one instance, and other processes have zero instances (in our case we specified two instances for the worker process, which overrides the default).

Scale a Process

Processes can be scaled independently. There’s an additional --process flag that can be passed to the cf scale command to achieve this.

Let’s scale the web process to two instances:

cf scale multi-process --process web -i 2

We can do the same for the worker process:

cf scale multi-process --process worker -i 3

cf SSH

When running apps with multiple processes, you use pass the --process flag to cf ssh into the container for a specific process. For example:

cf ssh multi-process --process web

Tidy up

When you’re done with the exercise, you can exit the web container and delete the multi-process app. We won’t be using it again in this course.