jetty:run seems to not notice changes to templates inside WEB-INF in your web app if you are using a war overlay

if you're interested in a little sample project to play with to demonstrate this, grab scalate...

http://scalate.fusesource.org/source.html

git clone git://github.com/scalate/scalate.git
cd scalate

its probably safest to do a build first
http://scalate.fusesource.org/building.html

then do

cd scalate-sample
mvn jetty:run

now view

http://localhost:8080/foo.ssp

now try editing

scalate-sample/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/foo.ssp

reload the browser - see how its not detected the changed template file?

If you do

 rm scalate-sample/target/tmp/webinf/WEB-INF/foo.ssp 

now do a reload in your browser. Hey presto - the template is now reloaded.

Bsaically Jetty is serving up the copy it made of the source on startup in target/tmp/webinf/WEB-INF/ rather than looking in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF

I wonder if the fix for this could be so simple as to get jetty to look in src/main/webapp before target/tmp/webinf from the overlay?

thanks Jan - I'll give that a try.

as an aside I've just been trying to upgrade from 7.0.1.v20091125 to 7.1.4.v20100610 and am having some other issues - will report back ASAP once I've upgraded and tried out your configuration idea!

Hmm - seems in 7.1.4.v20100610 jetty:run only expands the WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes directories into target/tmp/webinf/WEB-INF. So none of my shared templates from the overlay in WEB-INF/* are used in "mvn jetty:run". I'm gonna go hunting around to see if there's a way to get jetty:run to reuse all the WEB-INF contents...

So it seems from 7.0.2.v20100331 onwards, "jetty:run" only considers WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib to be part of the overlay - everything else in WEB-INF is ignored.

This is different behaviour to both "mvn war" and "mvn jetty:run-war" which includes everything inside WEB-INF in the overlay. So this sounds like jetty:run is broken from 7.0.2.x onwards for overlays using WEB-INF. FWIW we've been following the practice of putting templates inside WEB-INF in various directories so that the templates are not visible directly - but only internally inside servlets/filters/jaxrs etc.

I wonder why everything inside WEB-INF is ignored for jetty:run? Maybe this change was a work around to ordering issues like I originally reported in this issue - that with overlays, jetty:run seems to prefer to use the copies of files in target/tmp/webinf over the source code?

Hi Jan

I tried your workaround (its in the scalate master if you fancy a looksie) but unfortunately it has the same effect - the issue is still there.

So I'm faced with either reload not working on 7.0.1.x - or overlays not working in 7.0.2.x or later.

James,

You had me going there for a minute. I could have sworn I had fixed this problem back in 7.0.2, so I was surprised to see it pop up again. Actually, I did fix it!

Here's the reference to the previous issue you raised that I fixed: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JETTY-1027

So all you need to do is to add the following to your <webAppConfig> element:

<unpackOverlays>true</unpackOverlays>

I'm uploading a little test webapp that shows the unpack of the overlays works. If you build it, then go to example-webapp/other-webapp and do mvn jetty:run, and hit http://localhost:8080/test/foo, the servlet will print out on stderr where the foo.foo file real path was found. Rename example-webapp/other-webapp/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/foo.foo to something else and rerun and you'll see the one from the my-webapp war is used instead.

cheers
Jan

Example webapp that uses resources inside overlayed wars.

I'm so sorry Jan! I'd actually missed your comment on JETTY-1027 - and thought this was a different issue connected to Jetty picking up the wrong file, rather than overlays not working with jetty:run. DOH! Sorry again - dinner on me next time we meet!

I've tried the <unpackOverlays> and it works an absolute treat - yay!

I"ll also try to avoid getRealPath() like the plague - the main reason its so useful is it lets us get access to the lastModified times which is very handy in templating to know if you've gotta reload the generated code etc.