Deployment Gradle

While it's possible to run a RIFE2 application with the embedded Jetty or Tomcat server in production, it's quite likely that you might want to create a standard wararchive and deploy your application to another servlet container.

The good news is that you don't need to change anything to your code at all!

RIFE2 provides a standard filter implementation that takes a Site class name as its parameter.

Hello World deployment descriptor

In order to deploy the Hello World application, all you need to do is use the following web.xml deployment descriptor.

The rifeSiteClass init parameter has been set to the hello.AppSite class name, which will be instantiated by the RifeFilter as your web application is deployed.

<web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_4_0.xsd"
         version="4.0">
    <filter>
        <filter-name>RIFE2</filter-name>
        <filter-class>rife.servlet.RifeFilter</filter-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>rifeSiteClass</param-name>
            <param-value>hello.AppSite</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>RIFE2</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>
</web-app>

Update your Gradle project to build the war archive

Create the war subproject:

mkdir -p war/src

Edit your main settings.gradle.kts and add war to the includes:

rootProject.name = "hello"
include("app","war")

Put the web.xml deployment descriptor from above in your project at war/src/web.xml.

Create your subproject build settings at war/build.gradle.kts:

plugins {
    war
}

version = 1.0

base {
    archivesName.set("hello")
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    implementation(project(":app"))
}

tasks.war {
    webAppDirectory.set(file("../app/src/main/webapp"))
    webXml = file("src/web.xml")
}

Now you can use Gradle to build the archive:

gradle war

Your war archive will be available at war/build/libs/hello-1.0.war.

Create an UberJar

Another popular way of deploying a web application is by creating an UberJar. This is a single executable jar archive that contains everything that is necessary to run your application, including the dependencies and resources.

The RIFE2 Gradle plugin you already activated in your project has support for creating an UberJar built .

Simply use the following Gradle command:

gradle uberjar

You'll find the UberJar at app/build/libs/hello-uber-1.0.jar and to run it, type the following:

java -jar app/build/libs/hello-uber-1.0.jar

NOTE: You can find these deployment strategies already set up in the RIFE2 GitHub template repository.

---

Next learn more about Static Resources