How to go from https://start.camunda.com/ to a Process Application?

[Nick-Minutello]

We have started with https://start.camunda.com/ and added functionality around integration of Camunda with the outside world (message listeners starting workflows, external tasks doing external work).

While this was great to get traction early on with the actual business problem at hand, we are now running into (I think) some shortcomings of this spring-boot-magic style setup.

• Cannot see how we can easily create a Camunda Process Application
• As I understand it, we need a Process Application (it seems) to be able to use custom forms.

Very much struggling to understand all the different spring-boot configurators.

If I, say, use the @EnableProcessApplication annotation on our application class, it appears that the auto-deployment doesn’t scan the whole classpath like before…

Any advice/pointers welcome.

[Nick-Minutello]

Answering my own question (though happy to hear if there is an easier way).

1. Add the @EnableProcessApplication to the Spring-boot app class (this will disable camunda-spring-boot’s default resource location (the rest of the config stays the same AFAIK)
2. Add a processes.xml in the META-INF dir. You can add an “empty” processes.xml - but note that the Camunda documentation is a bit wrong.
3. You MUST add the resourceRootPath which should be a dir in your classpath (and it must not be the root - ie “/” won’t work).
4. Put your process *.bpmn files in the subdir referred to by resourceRootPath

<process-application
  xmlns="http://www.camunda.org/schema/1.0/ProcessApplication"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

  <process-archive>
    <properties>
      <property name="isDeleteUponUndeploy">false</property>
      <property name="isScanForProcessDefinitions">true</property>
      <property name="resourceRootPath">some-dir-in-classpath</property>
    </properties>
  </process-archive>
</process-application>

I hope this helps someone avoid the headache I have been having the past 2 days.