Linux – Deploy Jetty as port 80 daemon on Linux

daemonjavajettylinuxweb-server

I'm curious what techniques you Linux admin gods are using to manage your Jetty deployments. I come from a Windows Server background so I'm still getting used to all of this. I've been looking for a good solution for deploying Jetty instances as port 80 on a Linux installation.

So far I've seen this thread which allows Jetty to run as a daemon:

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JETTY-458

And I've seen this thread which talks about alternates for setting up on port 80:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Howto/Port80

These all seemed kind of hacky. Surely there is a relatively standard way of deploying a web server like Jetty on Linux. I'm currently using CentOS 5.5 but open to other distros.

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, Java processes tend not to daemonize as well as other languages. For Jetty, you'll want to use something like daemonize to launch and manage the process.

Edit - some additional details:

After building daemonize (as per instructions in above link), the command line parameters are explained in the generated file daemonize.html. Test it out from the launch command to ensure it works as expected.

Then to launch Jetty at startup, add the daemonize command to an init shell script (e.g., for CentOS/RHEL append /etc/rc.d/rc.local). For example:

#!/bin/bash
#...other startup commands

/path-to/daemonize -c /path-to/jetty/ -p pid.txt -e error.log -o console.log -a /usr/bin/java -jar start.jar

Related Solutions

Linux – How to run a server on port 80 as a normal user on Linux

Short answer: you can't. Ports below 1024 can be opened only by root. As per comment - well, you can, using CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE, but that approach, applied to java bin will make any java program to be run with this setting, which is undesirable, if not a security risk.

The long answer: you can redirect connections on port 80 to some other port you can open as normal user.

Run as root:

# iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

As loopback devices (like localhost) do not use the prerouting rules, if you need to use localhost, etc., add this rule as well (thanks @Francesco):

# iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -d 127.0.0.1 --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080

NOTE: The above solution is not well suited for multi-user systems, as any user can open port 8080 (or any other high port you decide to use), thus intercepting the traffic. (Credits to CesarB).

EDIT: as per comment question - to delete the above rule:

# iptables -t nat --line-numbers -n -L

This will output something like:

Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
num  target     prot opt source               destination         
1    REDIRECT   tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:8080 redir ports 8088
2    REDIRECT   tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:80 redir ports 8080

The rule you are interested in is nr. 2, so to delete it:

# iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING 2

NullPointerException on jetty 7 startup with jetty deployment descriptor

my guess is, you have an additional slash. replace

<Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps-plus/webapp.war</Set>

with

<Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default=".">/webapps-plus/webapp.war</Set>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to run a server on port 80 as a normal user on Linux

NullPointerException on jetty 7 startup with jetty deployment descriptor

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