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Spring Boot Application deployment on remote server

I have a Java Spring Boot Application, and I build it with Maven. With
spring-boot-maven-plugin,
I can create fat, executable jar file.
Then I copy it to the remote server and run. But sometimes,
I change only one line or event one word in my code and I had to do whole build/copy step again. I'm sure that I'm doing it wrong, but I couldn't find another way that more efficient (Like capistrano in Rails).
At this point, I'm planning to clone source code to server, push from local, pull from remote, build and run approach. What is the correct (or elegant) way of doing this deployment?

For automatic build and deployment process (continuous integration), you can use Jenkins. Refer this documentation for more details: https://jenkins.io/doc/

I would say it depends where are you trying to do it.
The best and the most agile way to do it for a controlled environment is surely a CI-CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) pipelines, which complies-builds-tests-deploys your code against every commit made to the source code BUT it may be too slow to use CI-CD for a development environment where you had like to have a shorter feedback cycle and faster feedback to see how the code is progressing.
However, if you are talking about development environment, I will hit another chord and ask you why to deploy to the external server AT ALL while developing. When you use Spring Boot, which helps you develop a self-contained application, you get the Tomcat Server embedded with it for free. That gives you the choice to run the code anywhere you develop and test to move forward.
A simple maven goal - mvn spring-boot:run can make the code run anywhere you had like.
There is another magical library available in Spring-Boot, known as Devtools, which is meant to support agile developers. The library once in the app classpath, performs hot-swapping of byte-code to auto reload of code into the running application (running locally with embedded Tomcat) as soon there is a saved change. This is one of the coolest gadget that a developer can have.
Use of Spring-Loaded (or JRebel for non spring-boot apps) libraries can also help a developer do hot-swapping of byte code to load changes in running application as soon saved.
I hope it helps.

Would Docker or Vagrant be help in creating test machine for our enterprise product

I am working on a enterprise product and primarily there are 3 pieces to it swing based client, DB, Server(for now we can ignore DB part). Being enterprise product Client and Server comes with their own installer(it is not like configuring apache or JBOSS and deploy war's on it).
We have CI configured to generate the nightly OS specific builds for Client and server which can be installed.
So we have to test these build regularly on specific OS, which requires a lot of manual process of installing and creating system with X version client on Y OS OR X version server on Y OS. This is becoming very tedious since we are all on windows and doing next-> next -> really sucks(I have created a script which installed our product via shell but then it is still steps which I believe can be automated, but don't how). And also we need an isolation.
Now I am thinking how can we automate this process of creating these test machine. I have just started exploring Vagrant/Docker if they can be helpful to me (and under the their concept, still doesn't understand Puppet/Chef though) and I am confused in which strategy should I adopt
Create VM via vagrant and run my installation script on that box (This will require one VM per Client or per server)
Create VM via vagrant and run my client docker containers on it (this I guess, will require one VM for multiple client or server, since they would be under container)
Note: I have to create VM, since we are on window.either via vagrant or via boot2docker
So my question are
If these 2 strategy are valid and not wrong then out of these 2 which strategy should I adopt out of two ?
Are there any different strategy that I am missing or am I approaching this in right way ?
If strategy #2 is to be adopted then how can I create container/docker images in which my client is installed

how can I create container/docker images in which my client is installed
You must put in a Dockerfile all what you do in order to have your client started and configured.
In order to do so, you can either create a container, do all the stuff, and then docker commit or the better way is to put all the required commands in a Dockerfile, so that when you do a slight modification, you build a new version easily with a basic docker build -t myclient_version_n .
Check the docs
https://docs.docker.com/examples/mongodb/#creating-a-dockerfile-for-mongodb
and how to automate builds
http://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/builds/#automated-builds
how to create a Dockerfile
https://docs.docker.com/examples/nodejs_web_app/#creating-a-dockerfile
and have a look at existing Dockerfiles of containerized application in the docker Hub
https://registry.hub.docker.com/

An alternative to Vagrant would be to use Docker Machine. You could leverage the cloud providers as #m1keil mentioned too. Machine can provision Docker hosts on a number of providers and they are ready to go.
Disclosure: I work at Docker and am the maintainer of Machine :)

Your strategies seem valid to me. The addition of containers (docker) to your process might help you speed up and parallelize the testing process (if it's fully automatic testing) since the initialization time and the general resource consumption of a container are lower. However one cannot give you definitive answer without inspecting your testing process first. And since you haven't provided any details about it, it would be hard to tell you if you should use the first or the second strategy.
You can take advantage of the cloud and use services such as AWS, Azure, GCE, etc to initialize machines and run your tests. You can use Vagrant to do this, or skip Vagrant and create your own simple scripts by using the appropriate APIs of your chosen Cloud provider.
Also you can take a look at services such as Travis.ci, Circle.ci, and others, which might help you created automated testing pipe without the need to spend too much time on the plumbing.

I really like docker's ease of use via the Dockerfile. The Dockerfile let's you very easily update and control the software in the docker image, and then you can provision it in you CI/testing environment. Docker now has native Windows support, so this shouldn't prevent you from being able to use it: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/ Furthermore, I like that you can setup very lightweight, minimal machines, with only the build and runtime dependencies needed for your project, and store them for free on hub.docker.com. Depending on how long it takes to build & install certain dependencies, this can speed up your testing because you can just download a docker image with everything already installed and built, and then just build and test your actual project.
I use this for https://github.com/sourceryinstitute/opencoarrays, which is GCC's official implementation of Coarray Fortran. I have a little project https://github.com/zbeekman/nightly-docker-rebuild that lets you setup nightly docker image builds on hub.docker.com in under two minutes. I use this to trigger builds of https://github.com/zbeekman/nightly-gcc-trunk-docker-image because I can't rebuild GCC from source on Travis-CI.org without the build timing out. This way, I delegate the GCC nightly build to hub.docker.com and then just docker pull zbeekman/nightly-gcc-trunk-docker-image into a travis-ci instance to test OpenCoarrays against the latest GCC trunk.

Are you supposed to run automated integration tests against a QA server?

Are you supposed to run automated integration tests against a QA server or are you supposed to somehow start an application server from your tests? Does anyone do option #2? How are you supposed to start an application server from tests?
I'm just running into the dilemma of not knowing where to point my selenium driver to. This is a spring java app.

Are you supposed to run automated integration tests against a QA
server or are you supposed to somehow start an application server from
your tests?
As a practical concept, at least the way I see it, the more your test environment(s) looks like your production environment(s), the better. It means that even hardware, location, operational system, etc, have to be considered.
It all comes down to how much "effort" the project is willing to invest on the quality of the product.
You are supposed to run automated integration tests based on your product and project contexts. There isn't a single and final answer to your question, because there are a lot of variables that have to be considered.
Does anyone do option #2?
Yes, I do use a embedded application server but I only used it for database integration but you can apply that for functional automated testing as well.
How are you supposed to start an application server from tests?
One option is to use embedded containers that you can manage with Maven profiles. I recommend you to follow this Arquillian Getting Started guide to understand how it works, and then you can apply the same concept for Selenium and Spring.

I usually go with option 2 -- I use the Maven Jetty Plugin to start an application server running the webapp (usually under a 'test' profile to swap out certain dependencies like the database) and then run Selenium against the locally hosted application. You can bind the Jetty plugin to pre-integration-tests, and stop it in post-integration-tests.
I typically also include the JaCoCo plugin to instrument the Jetty JVM so that I can check coverage from Selenium-style integration tests.

JUnit Test Cases on Production

We have recently started TDD and we are writing JUnit test-cases for each of the RESTful webservices that we develop. Is it a good idea to run the JUnit test-cases on the production environment when a new version is released?
Background:
Our web-app is enterprise web-app and has complex business logic. The plan is to use #After and #AfterClass to cleanup the test-data generated by running test-cases.
The web-app is available as both SaaS and on-premise editions and we are planning to validate upgrades for both edition if it's feasible and a good practice. I understand that we will be having this test-cases run on staging environment but to make sure that we have not broken anything during upgrade/deployment or environment has not created any diverse affect.
Now question is, "Is it good practice? if no what is suggested?"

Your unit tests should just test the code. They shouldnt be modifying with external sources like databases and/or web services then they become integration tests.
Generally I would suggest running unit tests before building/deploying your project to production, these can be run on a build server or QA / staging server. Only if they all pass do you deploy to production, then you know the build is stable in that sense.
If you have integration tests that do speak to other services and may modify data etc, I wouldnt run these on production. I would run them on your QA/Staging server against the code that is about to be released to production.

This is an interesting question; I would say no you don't want to run a full unit test suite, however you might want to invest in maintaining a separate deployment smoke test suite.
Reason - it's possible your test suites could affect a prod database, e.g. bug in an actual test fails to rollback or something.
Also, you are not wanting to test your whole codebase in prod, just verify it deployed OK (assuming you got satsifactory results when you did run your whole test suite).

Continuous Integration for Intersystems Cache solutions

I am starting a project from scratch using Intersystems Cache. I would like to setup a Continuous Integration Server for the project. Cache has unit test libraries, so the idea is to import source into a test database, build the source, run unit tests in the cache terminal, based on changes in the version control system (ClearCase).
Apart from Cache Objectscript, there will definitely be some java code that needs to be built as well. Other technologies could be added later. So I need a Continuous Integration tool that is not bound to one specific technology and that is easily extendible. I have used CruiseControl for building java solutions in the past, but that has been quite some time ago and I am wondering if no better solution is available since.
What is the best (and hopefully free) Continuous Integration product, that is easiest to extend for different technologies?

I'd recommend looking at Hudson. It's insanely easy to try out as it is delivered as an executable jar. It also supports plugins so it may be better suited to extension and customization. There are also a good deal of very handy plugins for Hudson already out there. Its ClearCase support comes via a plugin. There's even a plugin to start and stop VMWare virtual machines from within your build process which may be of interest depending on how you're planning on handling your database server "needs."

I have built a makeshift Continuous Integration Server in the following screencast: http://www.ensemblisms.com/episodes/2

Raymond Roestenburg!!
I am currently testing a stack for continuous integration of our solution is developed in Caché , the stack I'm testing now includes versioning source code using Git + TortoiseGit (with a plugin called "cache-tort-git "https://github.com/intersystems-ru/cache-tort-git/wiki specific to Caché ) for local versioning and BitBucket for remote versioning.
For continuous integration I'm using the Jenkins (evolution of the Hudson) , with a job that downloads the updated source code and after runs a COS script that does the following tasks:
Compiles all the source code;
Compiles all CSP rules;
Compiles all CSP pages;
Run all unit tests;
Run all integration tests;