For Jetty to serve content (static or dynamic), you need to create a ContextHandler and add it to Jetty in
the appropriate place. A pluggable DeploymentManager exists in Jetty 7 and later to make this process easier. The
Jetty distribution contains example DeploymentManager configurations to deploy WAR files found in a directory to
Jetty, and to deploy Jetty context.xml
files into Jetty as well.
The DeploymentManager is the heart of the typical webapp deployment mechanism; it operates as a combination of an Application LifeCycle Graph, Application Providers that find and provide Applications into the Application LifeCycle Graph, and a set of bindings in the graph that control the deployment process.
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Before Jetty deploys an application, an AppProvider identifies the App and then provides it to the DeploymentManager. Two AppProviders come with the Jetty distribution:
WebAppProvider –monitors a directory for WebAppProvider *.war
files and submits them
to the Application LifeCycle Graph for deployment into a context with the same name as the
*.war
file itself.
ContextProvider –monitors a directory for *.xml
files, and using the Jetty
XML configurator creates a ContextHandler (usually a WebAppContext
) for the Application LifeCycle
Graph.
Activating both at the same time is possible, but can be confusing because you must take care to either keep
both systems deploying mutually exclusive webapps, or align naming conventions of
context.xml
style files with WAR and webapp directories.
The core feature of the DeploymentManager is the Application LifeCycle Graph.
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The nodes and edges of this graph are pre-defined in Jetty along the most common actions and states found. These nodes and edges are not hardcoded; you can adjust and add to them depending on your needs (for example, any complex requirements for added workflow, approvals, staging, distribution, coordinated deploys for a cluster or cloud, etc.).
New applications enter this graph at the Undeployed node, and the
java.lang.String DeploymentManager.requestAppGoal(App,String)
method pushes them through the graph.
A set of default
AppLifeCycle.Bindings
defines standard behavior, and handles deploying, starting, stopping, and undeploying applications. If you
choose, you can write your own AppLifeCycle.Bindings
and assign them to anywhere on the Application
LifeCycle graph.
Examples of new AppLifeCycle.Binding
implementations that you can write include:
Validating the incoming application.
Preventing the deployment of known forbidden applications.
Submitting the installation to an application auditing service in a corporate environment.
Distributing the application to other nodes in the cluster or cloud.
Emailing owner/admin of change of state of the application.
There are four default bindings:
StandardDeployer –Deploys the ContextHandler into Jetty in the appropriate place.
StandardStarter –Sets the ContextHandler to started and start accepting incoming requests.
StandardStopper –Stops the ContextHandler and stops accepting incoming requests.
StandardUndeployer –Removes the ContextHandler from Jetty.
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A fifth, non-standard binding, called Debug Binding, is also available for debugging reasons; It logs the various transitions through the Application LifeCycle.