Jetty/Howto/Use Jetty with Ant

Introduction

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Beginning To Use Ant

The Ant plugin depends on Jetty JARs, and so far it's necessary to build Jetty and then the Ant plugin directly from sources. Here's how it goes:

1. Get the latest jetty sources from http://dist.codehaus.org/jetty/
2. Unpack jetty and build it with 'mvn install' (If you don't have Maven yet, get it from http://maven.apache.org/)
3. Go to the extras/ant/ folder and build ant plugin with 'mvn install'
4. Go to <your M2 repo root>/repository/org/eclipse/jetty/jetty-ant and grab the jetty-ant plugin JAR.
5. Get these files to run Jetty with JSP/Servlets support (find these in <your M2 repo root>/repository/org/eclipse/jetty):
   • jetty.jar
   • jetty-util.jar
   • jetty-plus.jar
   • jetty-naming.jar
   • servlet-api-2.5.jar
   • jsp-api-2.1.jar
   • jsp-2.1.jar
   • and core-3.1.1.jar from <M2 repository>/org/eclipse/jdt/core/3.1.1/
6. Put all the JARs inside one lib directory (let's say jetty-lib).

Preparing the build.xml file

Let's start with an empty build.xml

<project name="Jetty-Ant integration test" basedir=".">
</project>

Then, you must define a jetty task: 

<project name="Jetty-Ant integration test" basedir=".">
  <path id="jetty.plugin.classpath">
     <fileset dir="jetty-lib" includes="*.jar"/>
  </path>
  <taskdef classpathref="jetty.plugin.classpath" resource="tasks.properties" loaderref="jetty.loader" />
</project>

Now, we are ready to add a new target with Jetty container declaration:

<project name="Jetty-Ant integration test" basedir=".">
  <path id="jetty.plugin.classpath">
    <fileset dir="jetty-lib" includes="*.jar"/>
  </path>
  <taskdef classpathref="jetty.plugin.classpath" resource="tasks.properties" loaderref="jetty.loader" />
 
  <target name="jetty.run">
    <jetty />
  </target>
</project>

Starting jetty on port 8080 is then a simple matter of executing ant jetty.run from the command line.

Deploying web applications

Adding web applications to the Jetty web server is now a simple matter of putting extra webapp tags inside jetty tag. Notice, that a tempDirectory attribute has been added to the jetty task to specify where temporary files are stored.

 
<project name="Jetty-Ant integration test" basedir=".">
  <path id="jetty.plugin.classpath">
    <fileset dir="jetty-lib" includes="*.jar"/>
  </path>
  <taskdef classpathref="jetty.plugin.classpath" resource="tasks.properties" loaderref="jetty.loader" />
 
  <target name="jetty.run">
    <jetty tempDirectory="jetty-temp">
      <webApp name="webapp1" warfile="webapp1.war" contextpath="/webapp1" />
    </jetty>
  </target>
</project>

You can put many webapp tags inside jetty tag, thus deploying many web applications simultaneously.

Plugin syntax

There are many ways to configure jetty task:

• tempDirectory - specifies the Jetty temporary web directory:

<jetty tempDirectory="jetty-temp" />