Deploy multiple war files under the same root path on tomcat - spring

I'm trying to deploy multiple spring war files with tomcat maven plugin each with a shared root path between them.
For example when I deploy now each app can be accessed by:
localhost:8080/app1
localhost:8080/app2
The desired paths would be:
localhost:8080/apps/app1
localhost:8080/apps/app2
Is this possible to do with multiple war files? I would like to keep this app decoupled from tomcat as much as possible as well so please take this into consideration as well.

You can add /apps to each application's context path.

Related

How can I include a resource file (logback.xml) in a project when building JAR but not when embedded in a WAR?

I'm working on a project that uses two maven projects (named core and webapp); core is built with JAR packaging and used for two different purposes: as a stand-alone app (essentially an executable JAR), and also embedded into webapp.
For its purpose as a stand-alone app, core needs to have its own logback configuration (a logback.xml file) that needs to be included on the classpath. Normal Maven convention would have me put it in src/main/resources/logback.xml. That works fine, but causes a problem when the core JAR is included in webapp. webapp needs to have its own logback configuration, but the container (tc Server or Jetty) is picking up the one from core.jar first.
I realize that logback can be told about a custom config location via a system property (-D on the command line) but that's not viable in a app container like Tomcat or Jetty.
I've read some other people asking about this situation, but none of the solutions I've seen sits well with me. One solution involved setting up a context listener that runs early in the webapp initialization and explicitly configures logback based on a <context-param>. That's a bit brutish in my opinion, and probably a hard sell to my fellow dev team when log4j "just works" in this situation.
I'm far from a Maven expert, so I'm hoping there is some elegant way to get Maven to help me here. Or perhaps some logback extension or add-on that makes it more web-app friendly. Or even a clever idea that I haven't thought of.
There are a number of possible solutions, but the easiest is to put the file in its own module and mark the dependency as provided. The, conspire to have it on the classpath when running the standalone version of the app.
The solution that we ended up using was to leave only the common "non-app" pieces (code and configuration) in core and then extract the other "app" pieces into a new module (batch-app).
The logging configuration only lives in the 2 app projects (webapp and batch-app) that depend on core. core has a logback-test.xml configuration in it, but that's excluded from the JAR that maven builds (since it's in the src/test/resources folder).

Externalizing static content from a WAR and serve both on jetty

In my project I use Maven to package a web application to a WAR which is later deployed to Jetty using a custom Maven plugin on CentOS. The custom plugin is used by every project that deployes to a production environment. There is now a requirement that all static content (like web site text, properties) is packed outside of the WAR so that it can be changed in production without requiring a new release cycle. I am unsure how to achieve this externalization.
The Jetty server has the directory structure described in Jetty quick start guide. Currently, the web application already offers some .properties files which can be altered externally, and these reside in the resources/ directory. These files are moved here by the custom Maven plugin. The WAR resides in the webapp/ folder. One option for my problem is to use <packagingExcludes> of maven-war-plugin to not include e.g. *.xhtml and *.properties in the WAR. Later, I can use the custom Maven plugin to move excluded files to resources/ directory. But, I have a feeling this is not the correct way to externalize static content... Shouldn't xhtml files live in webapp/ folder while the only the properties file live in resources/ folder?
I have also researched the option of deploying the WAR as exploded, but I am unsure of the implications of such. Clearly, the changes in the exploded WAR files will be overwritten in the next deploy, but the idea is to do static changes both in development and production. Also, I am not sure how to achieve WAR "explosion", is it something that Jetty does for your WAR if configured in jetty.xml or do I have to extract the WAR before deploying?
Lastly, how do people serve static content in Jetty which can be altered in production? Do both the WAR and static files live side by side
The Jetty resources folder should not be used for application files. A J2EE web application (war) should be self-contained -- and in Jetty, reside only on the /webapps folder -- and its only binding to the container (Jetty servlet engine) is via the web.xml deployment descriptor.
Since property files may be read from the classpath and the Jetty resources folder is part of the system classpath, a property file there could be read by the web application class loader. Note that there are other ways to read property files as well and the Jetty resources folder should not be used for application properties. Also, the application may not be portable as other application servers have different forms of webapp classloader isolation.
If the below architecture approach does not work for you, then your only approach would be to expand (explode the war) in the /webapps folder and hope for the best when files are edited.
Tackling this from a different angle,
- if your web application depends on .properties and .xhtml files in order to function properly, then these files are probably not 'content'. The fact that there is a business process that requires them to to be updated ad hoc does not make them content.
- 'content' is something like text, images, and videos that is added, edited and removed by an administrative user. The application does not depend on it for correct execution, it merely reads and passes it on the browser.
Suggestions:
I would suggest that you deploy your application every time there is a change to the .xhtml or .properties files change. If the editors of these files are power business users, you might think of a git push-pull tool for them and a continuous build hook, so that when they make changes and push them to the git repository, the application gets tagged with a newer version and gets built and deployed. If there is a problem (tag not closed in xhtml), then it would be easy to roll back to the last tag.
Alternately, if the changes are minor (such as text descriptions), then modify the application to read them from an arbitrary external file (outside the webapp) -- a location that is provided to the webapp on startup. You can then package a 'default' version of the file in the webapp, but the code would attempt to look in the specified external location first.
I discovered that you can add HTML tags to properties and later use <h:outputFormat> to fetch these properties with parameters. Also, you can do pretty neat stuff with property files as described in MessageFormat API.
My solution was to keep the .xhtml files inside the WAR, but use simple HTML snippets properties from the default resource bundle which is based on a .properties file. These properties were included in the .xhtml using <h:outputFormat>and <h:outputText>. This allows the user to add simple styling like bold and underline to the snippets.
The properties file are copied to the Jetty resource folder using the custom Maven plugin, so I have kept the .properties files in the WAR. For some reason the Jetty resource folder has precedence over the packed .properties files, so this works out fine. Also, as Akber pointed out, I will have the default versions of the properties available if for some reason the WAR was moved to some other application server where the resource folder is not available.
Of course, with this approach the code can break if malformed HTML is placed inside the snippet properties, as pointed out by Akber, but it works for our application as it is very small. I may never have done this if this was a much larger application, but then I might have gone for a database based solution for adding static text (like Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress).

Resource sharing between war files

We've multiple wars being deployed on one server.
The CSS, JS, images, ... are mostly common for all war files.
What is the best way to serve these resources?
Options I've found so far:
Use Maven Overlay plugin (This causes us to loose flexibility of hot-swapping resources in our IDE)
Create a common jar to package in your war (needs Servlet 3.0 api if I'm correct)
Create a war file that contains only resources and that can be deployed on the server as well
If you have may users, then a content delivery network would be an appropriate way to deliver the static files.

Spring Rest Controllers: deployment to Tomcat

I want to develop a RESTful API within my multi-module Spring-based project using Spring Rest. For that purpose, I have a webapp module and some other business/data layer modules. For example, this would be my simplified project structure:
myProject
-- webapp (war-packaged)
-- business (jar-packaged)
-- data (jar-packaged)
Business module depends on data module and so does webapp on business module. Webapp imports successfully every module's application context. Now I want to be able to use some business module classes that do some kind of calculation according to some data retrieved from a DB in order to provide a certain resource. All examples I had a look at were quite simple and this multi-module approach was not covered at all.
What is the problem? As far as I am concerned, Tomcat loads classes in a certain order. Concretely, it first loads WEB-INF/classes and only then WEB-INF/lib (where all webapp dependencies are placed, business module in this case). So, there goes my question. Where should I place my Controller classes? If I place them within the webapp module I won't be able to autowire any business-module bean since Tomcat will throw a ClassNotFoundException when I deploy the webapp war (at least this is the behaviour I have experienced).
The answer is probably easy but I'm quite new to Spring and its world!
Thank you all in advance.
Your business and data jars would go into the WEB-INF/lib directory. Then those jars will automatically be added to the CLASSPATH for your app when you deploy it. You will need to deploy your application as a WAR file.
Ideally, you would build the business and data jars, add them to some repository, and then the build system would pull the proper version of each jar into the WEB-INF/lib directory for you.
And as to the original question, the controller classes go into the webapp/src directory.
Assuming you are using Maven 2. Make sure your assembly creator (e.g. maven war module) is including your dependent .jar files within the final .war file's WEB-INF/lib directory. This should be the default procedure (per: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/war-mojo.html#dependentWarIncludes ). The other concern, then is whether your sub-projects (business and data) are even creating jars so that they could be included in the WAR output.
If you have doubts as to the contents of that war file, browse the listing of it by executing
'jar tvf $WAR_FILENAME' from the command line and by observing the WEB-INF/lib directory contents. You should see your business and data jars in there. Go further by exploding your war file, then browsing the contents of business and data jar (using 'jar xvf $FILENAME' to explode in a new directory).
Hope this helps!

what is domain location of weblogic application server?

I am new to weblogic.I am trying to configure liferay with weblogic.
I want to put liferay dependency jar files inside lib folder of domain.
Now i am confused because in Oracle>Middleware>user_projects>domains there are two folders that contains lib folder.
1)base_domain
2)my_domain.
Can someone let me know where should i put all dependency jar files?
First of all, make sure which domain you are using. base_domain and my_domain are not the ones shipped with weblogic. They are the ones created for app deployment.
Please check where your application is deployed and then place your jar in that domain.

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