Jetty with Maven

One of the things that Maven always promised to deliver was a dramatic reduction of development time and more uniform development patterns. The jetty plugin from mortbay really does deliver on these promises - it is one of those plugins that really make me sit back and go "why didn't anyone do this sooner".

Basically, for when your developing a webapp and need a quick test of it, then jetty comes to the rescue. Simply drop the following configuration into your webapp's pom.xml:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

Then from the command line run:

  mvn jetty:run

This will start up jetty and run from the target/${build.finalName} directory - this means that as you continue developing Jetty is updated with the changes you make as you rebuild your artifact.



Pretty cool! This plugin obviously comes with a whole bunch of configuration options, but in it's default state it suits most of my needs. The only configuration I usually use is to update the port that Jetty is hosted on, this following config does that for you, updating the port to :8081

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
      <connectors>
        <connector implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.nio.SelectChannelConnector">
          <port>8081</port>
        </connector>
      </connectors>
    </configuration>
  </plugin>

More details on the plugin can be found at http://www.mortbay.org/maven-plugin
which covers more configuration options you can shake a stick at!

I've been using this whilst developing Apache Tuscany enabled webapps, it really has improved my turnaround, so I thought it'd be useful to share!