Add Jetty Maven Plugin to Your JAX-RS Project

When building RESTful Web Services for your Mobile app with Java JAX-RS and Jersey you can use any Java Servlet container to deploy and run your final .WAR file. But if you use Jetty then there is a very quick way to build and run your application using Maven and jetty-maven-plugin.

Below is a short example on how to add jetty-maven-plugin to your project, how to start up jetty and how to access your Web Service Endpoint url .

1. Grab the jetty-maven-plugin from https://mvnrepository.com

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.mortbay.jetty/jetty-maven-plugin -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
    <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>8.1.16.v20140903</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

2. Add the jetty-maven-plugin into your pom.xml as one more plugin. For example, if jetty-maven-plugin is the only plugin you have, then your pom.xml <build> section will look like this:

<build>
        <finalName>CodeExamplesWebApp</finalName>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
                <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>8.1.16.v20140903</version>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

Here is a complete pom.xml of one of my sample projects with jetty-maven-plugin added:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.appsdeveloperblog.ws</groupId>
    <artifactId>CodeExamplesWebApp</artifactId>
    <packaging>war</packaging>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <name>CodeExamplesWebApp Maven Webapp</name>
    <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>junit</groupId>
            <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
            <version>3.8.1</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.bundles/jaxrs-ri -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.bundles</groupId>
            <artifactId>jaxrs-ri</artifactId>
            <version>2.25</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.glassfish.jersey.media/jersey-media-moxy -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.glassfish.jersey.media</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-media-moxy</artifactId>
            <version>2.25</version>
        </dependency>
        
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.ws.rs/javax.ws.rs-api -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.ws.rs</groupId>
            <artifactId>javax.ws.rs-api</artifactId>
            <version>2.0.1</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.servlet/javax.servlet-api -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.0</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.mortbay.jetty/jetty-maven-plugin -->

    </dependencies>
    <build>
        <finalName>CodeExamplesWebApp</finalName>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
                <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>8.1.16.v20140903</version>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

And this is it. To build your project you can use: 

mvn install

To run your project with Jetty use:

mvn jetty:run

By default Jetty will start on port 8080 will be available at:

http://localhost:8080/

If you have created your RESTful Web Services application following my example here: Create Jersey JAX-RS Project with Maven then you should be able to access your app using the following URL:

http://localhost:8080/api/users

Start Jetty on a different port

If the default port 8080 is already taken and is being used by your other Servlet Container then you can start Jetty on a different port. For example port 8888. To start Jetty on a different port simply run this Maven command:

mvn -Djetty.port=8888 jetty:run

To stop Jetty use: 

$ ctrl + c

I hope this tutorial was helpful for you.

Happy learning!