Maven: The Definitive Guide

Configuring the Jetty Plugin

Once you’ve compiled, tested, and packaged your web application, you’ll likely want to deploy it to a servlet container and test the index.jsp that was created by the Maven Archetype plugin. Normally, this would involve downloading something like Jetty or Apache Tomcat, unpacking a distribution, copying your application’s WAR file to a webapps/ directory, and then starting your container. Although you can still do such a thing, there is no need. Instead, you can use the Maven Jetty plugin to run your web application within Maven. To do this, we’ll need to configure the Maven Jetty plugin in our project’s pom.xml. Add the plugin element shown in Example 5-2 to your project’s build configuration.

Example 5-2. Configuring the Jetty plugin

<project>
  [...]
  <build>
    <finalName>simple-webapp</finalName>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugins>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  [...]
</project>

Once you’ve configured the Maven Jetty plugin in your project’s pom.xml, you can then invoke the run goal of the Jetty plugin to start your web application in the Jetty Servlet container. Run mvn jetty:run as follows:

~/examples$ mvn jetty:run ... [INFO] [jetty:run] [INFO] Configuring Jetty for project: simple-webapp Maven Webapp [INFO] Webapp source directory = \ /Users/tobrien/svnw/sonatype/examples/simple-webapp/src/ main/webapp [INFO] web.xml file = \ /Users/tobrien/svnw/sonatype/examples/simple-webapp/src/ ...