jetty-rackup

For the newer projects we decided to switch from MRI to JRuby. One of the bigger questions is certainly the deployment.

Reading and trying all the warbler stuff, we had enough of packaging and wanted to do it the Ruby/Sinatra way (with a standalone script, where one can consciously start things like run Sinatra::Application from a rackup script).

Embedding jetty is also mentioned in the jetty documentation "For many applications, HTTP is just another interface protocol. Jetty can easily be embedded in such applications and products without adopting a WWW centric application architecture."

So here is the solution:

• write your Rack based application as usual
• create a rackup script config.ru as usual; there is more information in the official tutorial https://github.com/rack/rack/wiki/(tutorial)-rackup-howto
• install jetty-rackup (this project), e.g. gem install jetty-rackup or git clone git://github.com/geekq/jetty-rackup.git
• from your application folder run jetty-rackup. You can also provide a path to non-standard rackup-script and the desired port number for the server to run.

Now your application runs inside jetty servlet container. Enjoy!

$cat config.ru

#\ -p 8765
require 'rubygems'
gem 'sinatra', '>= 1.0.0'
require './my_app.rb'
set :run, false # disable built-in sinatra web server
set :environment, :development
set :base_url, 'http://xxtrial' # custom application option
run Sinatra::Application

The jetty and jruby-rack binaries are now provided for your convinience. But you can also download a different version of them, if you wish, from the official web sites of the respective projects:

• http://jetty.codehaus.org/jetty/
• http://kenai.com/projects/jruby-rack/pages/Home

The major gem version (7) now matches the used jetty version.

What's the best way to set max memory?

jruby -J-Xmx2048m  /usr/local/lib/jetty-rackup/jetty-rackup config.ru

There are no automated tests for jetty-rackup. But there are some example applications with rackup configuration. Just cd to the particular example directory and run. E.g.

cd examples/just_ruby/
jetty-rackup
firefox http://localhost:9292/stranger

jetty-rackup uses config.ru file from the current directory by default.

• 7.2.0
  • Add support for Host option. In addition to specifying port now a host ip can also be specified if e.g. you only wish to bind the server only to the loopback interface 127.0.0.1 and not to all IPs.
  • Add support for pid option - create pid file

For Rails deployment you may prefer jetty-rails http://jetty-rails.rubyforge.org/

(c) 2009 Vodafone Group Services GmbH

(c) 2013 Vladimir Dobriakov

Vladimir Dobriakov http://blog.geekq.net, http://www.mobile-web-consulting.de

With contributions by Leandro Silva, Jason Rogers and erdeszt.

• Michal Hantl for the first working jetty based 'Hello world' application. http://michal.hantl.cz/
• Nick Sieger for the explanation of servlet context init params and of course jruby-rack itself. http://blog.nicksieger.com/
• Thanks to Nik for the Jetty 7.0 port.