Running a trial web app using Maven, Eclipse and Jetty

On my page about creating a web app I described how to quickly set up a web app project with Maven and Eclipse. Now let's see if we can run that web app!

Using Maven to Run Jetty

Maven can be used to run Jetty on your local machine, and configured to run a webapp. Sounds complicated, but really it's not!

Open eclipse, select the web app project (we called ours "demo") and select the pom.xml file
We're going to add the Jetty plugin, so select the plugins tab and click "Add"
Search for "jetty" and select the org.mortbay.jetty / maven-jetty-plugin
This should have populated some of the boxes, but we want to add some more information about that plugin so click on the "pom.xml" tab to edit the XML, and change the Jetty plugin section as below
To start Jetty, you can run mvn jetty:run from the command line, or right mouse button click on "pom.xml" and Select "Run as > Run Configurations" then add jetty:run as a run configuration
Your web app should now be available at http://localhost:8080/
To stop Jetty, use <ctrl-c> on the command line or press the stop button on the Eclipse console window if you started it from within Eclipse

Revised Jetty plugin to showing some of the common settings that can be changed to suit your needs. This specifies running Jetty on port 8080 (the default) and setting your webapp context path as the document root. It is also configured to periodically scan the project for changes and automatically redeploy the webapp.

<plugin>
            <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
            <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>8.0.0.M3</version>
            <configuration>
                    <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
                    <contextPath>/</contextPath>
                    <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
                    <stopKey>STOP</stopKey>
                    <stopPort>8005</stopPort>
                    <port>8080</port>
            </configuration>            
</plugin>

The Complete pom.xml file for our demo project

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>uk.co.itforeveryone</groupId>
  <artifactId>demo</artifactId>
  <packaging>war</packaging>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>demo Maven Webapp</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <finalName>demo</finalName>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
            <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>8.0.0.M3</version>
            <configuration>
                    <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
                    <contextPath>/</contextPath>
                    <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
                    <stopKey>STOP</stopKey>
                    <stopPort>8005</stopPort>
                    <port>8080</port>
            </configuration>            
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>