Starting and Stopping Jetty Gracefully with Groovy and JMX

I'm working on a project that uses Tapestry and ActiveMQ together; it works great on my Mac, but on my client's Windows workstation, ActiveMQ doesn't shut down cleanly and corrupts its local files pretty consistently.

Unfortunately, there isn't a way (using RunJettyRun, the Eclipse plugin for Jetty) to gracefully shutdown Jetty. You just pull the plug on it, mid execution.

Looking for a solution, I realized that Jetty can expose most of its internals via JMX; this would allow us to start it up and shut it down cleanly in development.

So, I created a Groovy LaunchApp class to launch Jetty with JMX enabled:

package com.example.main

import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory 


import org.eclipse.jetty.jmx.MBeanContainer 
import org.eclipse.jetty.server.Server 
import org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory

/** 
 * Alternative the RunJettyRun Eclipse plugin that allows greater control over how Jetty starts up.
 */
class LaunchApp {
 
 static PORT = 8080
 
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  
  def LOG = LoggerFactory.getLogger(LaunchApp.class)
  
  LOG.info "Starting up Jetty ${Server.getVersion()} instance on port $PORT ..."
  
  def server = new Server(PORT)
  
  server.stopAtShutdown = true
  server.gracefulShutdown = 1000 // 1 second
  
  def context = new WebAppContext()
  
  context.setContextPath "/"
  context.setWar "src/main/webapp"
  
  server.setHandler context
  
  def mBeanServer = ManagementFactory.getPlatformMBeanServer();
  def mBeanContainer = new MBeanContainer(mBeanServer);
 
  server.container.addEventListener(mBeanContainer);
  
  mBeanContainer.start();
  
  server.start()
  
  LOG.info "Join the fun at http://localhost:$PORT/landing"
  
  server.join()
  
  LOG.info("Jetty instance has shut down")
 }
}

... and a Groovy StopApp class:

package com.example.main

import javax.management.ObjectName
import javax.management.remote.JMXConnectorFactory
import javax.management.remote.JMXServiceURL

/** 
 * The flip-side of {@link LaunchApp}, this tool locates the running Jetty instance and uses JMX
 * to request a graceful shutdown.
 */
class StopApp {
 
 static JMX_PORT = 8085
 
 static JMX_URL = "service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:$JMX_PORT/jmxrmi"
 
 public static void main(String[] args) {
  println "Shutting down Jetty instance"
  
  def connector = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(new JMXServiceURL(JMX_URL), null)
  
  connector.connect null
  
  def connection = connector.getMBeanServerConnection()
  
  def on = new ObjectName("org.eclipse.jetty.server:type=server,id=0")
  
  connection.invoke on, "stop", null, null 
  
  println "Shutdown command sent"   
 }
}

The only trick is to ensure that LaunchApp's JMX MBean server is exposed for access, so you need the following system properties set:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=8085
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false