Note: I stopped actively develop this plugin in favour of Gretty
I needed a Jetty plugin for Gradle for the newer versions of Jetty. Because I couldn't find any ready-to-use plugins, I started to create one myself. I never had the intention to create a script-compatible version of the plugin. Instead my goal was to create a feature-compatible Jetty plugin for the Eclipse generation.
I quickly noticed that the original Gradle Jetty plugin is more or less a plain port of the maven-jetty-plugin.
The original jettyRun task is IMHO a hard to maintain Jetty hack, because Jetty doesn't really support a scattered
webapp. I also think the configuration of the original jettyRun task is not very gradle-like (lots of unnecessary
double configuration and so on).
So I decided to change a few thinks. I hope, you find this plugin still useful. I've read that the Gradle developers are working on a new test framework integration, that supports a number of different web container. My own reasons to use the Jetty plugin are simple: it is great for rapid development and very fast to setup. It has a reasonable default configuration and should work for most webapps without any additional configuration.
First of all, I changed the name of the tasks and the plugin from jetty to jettyEclipse. This was necessary, because
the classes of the original plugin live within the Gradle distribution. Even if you don't do apply 'jetty' in your
buildscript, the classes are automatically imported and if task classes only differ in their packages, there will be
conflicts and strange errors.
I've merged the tasks jettyRun and jettyRunWar. Now there is only one task called jettyEclipseRun. The task is
always based on a war file. You can define the war file directly or you can make the jettyEclipseRun task dependent
to a war task (that produces a war file). See the build.gradle file in the example directory.
While the jettyEclipseRun task is running, you can trigger some actions via keyboard:
- Pressing
ENTERreloads the webapp - Pressing
r + ENTERrebuilds and reloads the webapp - Pressing
R + ENTERrebuilds the webapp (without reloading)
You can schedule automatic rebuilds every x seconds. Gradle does a fantastic job in recognizing changed input for the
build. If no input changed, Gradle detects this fact and skips all build tasks and the output keeps unchanged. Only if
input files have changed, the rebuild will produce a new output file. This is very efficient and should be comparable
to the old input file scanning of the old jettyRun task.
If you combine both features, you should be able to change any kind of source file that takes part in the war output. The change will trigger a recreation of the war file during the automatic build. A changed war file will either automatically reload the webapp or print a message to the console, so you can manually reload the webapp.
Your need to add the following lines to your build script:
buildscript {
repositories {
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
classpath (group: 'com.sahlbach.gradle', name: 'gradle-jetty-eclipse-plugin', version: '1.9.+')
}
}
apply plugin: 'jettyEclipse'
You can configure global settings of the plugin using the jettyEclipse extension. The following parameters
can be set:
| Name | Type | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| additionalRuntimeJars | File[] | - | list of additional jars that will be added to the classpath |
| automaticReload | boolean | false | true: the webapp is reloaded after changes were detected false: changes are reported to console, reload must be triggered manually via the console |
| contextPath | String | / | the context path of the webapp |
| daemon | boolean | false | will start the jetty server detached |
| httpPort | int | 8080 | Jetty Server will listen to this port |
| jettyConfig | File | jetty default | Location of a jetty XML configuration file whose contents will be applied before any plugin configuration |
| overrideWebXml | File | - | will be applied after the webapp web.xml |
| passwordFile | File | - | text file containing user database. Will setup Basic Authenticator with this database. The format of the file is user: password[,role]. See example project. |
| rebuildIntervalInSeconds | int | - | > 0: starts background builds every x seconds |
| rebuildSkipTasks | Task[] | - | these tasks will be skipped during rebuild |
| rebuildTask | Task | dependent war type task | the task that is used for the background rebuild |
| requestLog | File | - | NCSA request log of the jetty server |
| scanIntervalInSeconds | int | 5 | scans the war file for changes every x seconds (via lastModified) |
| skipAnnotations | boolean | false | skip scanning of servlet 3.0 annotations, which can take a great deal of time |
| stopPort | int | 8090 | Port to listen for stop request via the jettyEclipseStop task |
| stopKey | String | stop | Key to provide when stopping jetty via the jettyEclipseStop task |
| warFile | File | - | War File to use for the web app (if not set, the jettyEclipseRun task will search for a dependent War task and use its output war) |
| webDefaultXml | File | jetty default | jetty default web.xml (applied before web.xml of war) |
Tasks of type JettyEclipseRun can have all the above parameters. The task will use the values of jettyEclipse, but
can be overridden with local values.
Tasks of type JettyEclipseStop can have the stopPort and stopKey parameter. To stop a jettyEclipseRun task using
a jettyEclipseStop task, the parameters have to correlate, of course.
The first version of this plugin is 1.9.0. The version number has the following meaning:
This is the gradle major version. The plugin for gradle 1.x has a 1 here.
This is the eclipse server version. So Jetty 9 has a 9 here.
This is the incremental release number of this plugin. We start with 0 and increment with every release.
So Version 1.9.0 is the first release for gradle 1.8+ containing a Jetty 9
- to the implementors of the maven-jetty-plugin
- to the implementors of the build-in jetty plugin of gradle
- to chriswk for his gradle-jetty9-plugin (I did not fork from him to get all the compile problems when upgrading the original jetty gradle plugin, and later I changed pretty much but I took a couple of ideas from his project)
This plugin is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.