Running Jetty on Linux

An article by Glen    1 Comment

Old news to hard-core Jetty users, but I’ve only just discovered /bin/jetty.sh in the jetty-all distro. This neat little shell script lets you manage all sorts of Jetty goodness straight from the command line including start, stop, restart and check (jar paths, home dirs, etc).

I’ve previously been doing dodgy stuff with:

    java -jar start.jar &

from the command line and have been having all sorts of unexpected results over time. I’m hoping this slick little script is going to help me out.

In another hot tip, I found that creating a “work” directory in my $JETTY_HOME will tell Jetty to put temp files there rather than in /tmp. The problem with /tmp is that it may get swept by cron jobs every so often – causing your web apps to crash and burn. It’s in the FAQ, but I hadn’t come across it before.

In yet other news, today’s outage was due to a botched upgrade to Jetty 5. Having all sorts of problems running Pebble on 5 (some related to commons logging clashes, but others related to straight page compilation). I’m going to do some more testing on my local PC before attempting another deploy. For now, I’m sticking with 4.2.x (I know, where’s my sense of adventure?).