How to stop gracefully the actor system for an akka-http server that must be deployed.

Question

I just created my first rest server with akka-http. The problem is that I do not know how to deploy the server in such a way that I could gracefully shutdown the actor syste

Answer 1

One solution is to add an Actor to your ActorSystem that listens for a particular signal and calls shutdown:

import akka.actor.{Actor, Props}

object ShutdownMessage

object KillSwitchActor {
  def props : Props = Props[KillSwitchActor]
}

class KillSwitchActor extends Actor {
  def receive = {
    case ShutdownMessage => context.system.shutdown()
    case _ => {}
  }
}//end class KillSwitchActor

Then you simply setup your KillSwitchActor:

import akka.actor.ActorSystem

val actorSystem : ActorSystem = ActorSystem("testKillSwitch")

val killRef = actorSystem actorOf KillSwitchActor.props

//"Say hello to my little friend!" - Tony Montana 
if(someTerminatingCondition) { killRef ! ShutdownMessage }