Jetty to serve plain html and JS code

Question

I've installed Jetty using homebrew on osx. Jetty is in the usual folder:

/usr/local/Cellar/jetty/9.4.5.v20170502

However, we are not going to use this for anything related to Java. It's just our requirement that the web server we will have in production is Websphere. Our code is pure html and some JS. Only static files. All the tutorials on the web require modifying XML files and setting up complex folder structures for java apps. We do not need any of this. All we want is to put html/js files in some specific place.

Is there an easy way to do this? Do we have to create a start.jar for this simple task? How do we create a WAR package via Maven or something else? Would appreciate any simple pointer to getting this dev environment set up. Thank you!

Answer 1

It seems you might be overthinking this a bit. start.jar is merely the JAR file that starts up the sever. You can easily host static content out of Jetty. I am unsure of your specific requirements, but for the sake of an example, I will just assume you have a simple webapp with a page and some resources. Your implementation might look like this.

Inside the Jetty 9.4.5.v20170502 directory - Also called Jetty_Home (you can learn about Jetty_Home vs Jetty_Base here), you'll find the following directories:

bin demo-base etc lib logs modules resources webapps

These are the standard of truth and should not be modified (though demo-base can be removed entirely if desired). You will want to create your own Jetty_Base directory to host your content out of, let's call it stackoverflow for this example. It is worth noting that a Jetty_Base can exist anywhere, I am just keeping it here for ease of this example.

Inside the stackoverflow directory you'll find nothing to start with, so we will need to enable some modules to populate our Jetty_Base. Now, I have no idea what all you plan to do with this webserver, so I will keep it minimal - enough to host the content. From inside this directory run:

> java -jar ../start.jar --create-startd
MKDIR : ${jetty.base}/start.d
INFO  : Base directory was modified

This will create a start.d directory for all of our module files to live in, which makes modifying and configuring things a breeze (though for the sake of this example everything will be left default). Now we need to add the modules which will enable the functionality on the server. You can view a whole list of available modules by running:

> java -jar ../start.jar --list-modules

I am not going to paste the whole list here but instead enable the following:

> java -jar ../start.jar --add-to-start=server,client,deploy,http,webapp,jsp
INFO  : webapp          initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/webapp.ini
INFO  : server          initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/server.ini
INFO  : security        transitively enabled
INFO  : apache-jsp      transitively enabled
INFO  : servlet         transitively enabled
INFO  : jsp             initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/jsp.ini
INFO  : jndi            transitively enabled
INFO  : client          initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/client.ini
INFO  : http            initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/http.ini
INFO  : annotations     transitively enabled
INFO  : plus            transitively enabled
INFO  : deploy          initialized in ${jetty.base}/start.d/deploy.ini
MKDIR : ${jetty.base}/webapps
INFO  : Base directory was modified

This will enable all the modules I defined (server,client,deploy,http,webapp,jsp) as well as any dependencies required for them to operate and any required folders (such as webapps).

Now, I created a very small webapp named example. I've gone ahead and moved it into the webapps directory inside our stackoverflow Jetty_Base:

> tree
.
├── start.d
│   ├── client.ini
│   ├── deploy.ini
│   ├── http.ini
│   ├── jsp.ini
│   ├── server.ini
│   └── webapp.ini
└── webapps
    ├── example
    │   ├── images
    │   │   ├── jetty-header.jpg
    │   │   └── webtide_logo.jpg
    │   ├── index.html
    │   └── jetty.css
    └── example.xml

I have a context xml file I created for this webapp named example.xml, which is only serving static content, and it is very simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Jetty//Configure//EN" "http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/configure_9_3.dtd">

<Configure id="exampleApp" class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
  <Set name="contextPath">/example</Set>
  <Set name="war"><Property name="jetty.webapps" default="."/>/example</Set>
</Configure>

This configures the webapp so that when I run the server I can navigate to, in this case, localhost:8080/example and see my content. Now all I have to do is run my server. From inside the stackoverflow directory:

java -jar ../start.jar
2017-06-08 10:36:32.300:INFO::main: Logging initialized @427ms to org.eclipse.jetty.util.log.StdErrLog
2017-06-08 10:36:32.477:INFO:oejs.Server:main: jetty-9.4.5.v20170502
2017-06-08 10:36:32.494:INFO:oejdp.ScanningAppProvider:main: Deployment monitor [file:///Users/example/installs/repository/jetty-distribution-9.4.5.v20170502/stackoverflow/webapps/] at interval 1
2017-06-08 10:36:32.633:INFO:oeja.AnnotationConfiguration:main: Scanning elapsed time=26ms
2017-06-08 10:36:32.668:INFO:oejs.session:main: DefaultSessionIdManager workerName=node0
2017-06-08 10:36:32.668:INFO:oejs.session:main: No SessionScavenger set, using defaults
2017-06-08 10:36:32.669:INFO:oejs.session:main: Scavenging every 600000ms
2017-06-08 10:36:32.692:INFO:oejsh.ContextHandler:main: Started o.e.j.w.WebAppContext@6e06451e{/example,file:///Users/example/installs/repository/jetty-distribution-9.4.5.v20170502/stackoverflow/webapps/example/,AVAILABLE}{/example}
2017-06-08 10:36:32.713:INFO:oejs.AbstractConnector:main: Started ServerConnector@21a947fe{HTTP/1.1,[http/1.1]}{0.0.0.0:8080}
2017-06-08 10:36:32.714:INFO:oejs.Server:main: Started @840ms

And now you have a server up and running and content being served. I hope this helps. It can seem overwhelming at first, but it isn't so bad once your get your hands dirty. I recommend reading up more at the official documentation.