A Sunny Commune - Cheng's Blog

How to Run a War File?

This question has been asked many times, and I figured it's worth repeating. The Simple answer:

1. Start the web server;

2. Deploy the war file to the web server;

3. Visit JSP pages or servlets in the browser.

 In more details:

1.  It is not possible to run a war file outside of a container.

A war file contains JSP pages, Servlet classes, static html files, and other java classes and resources.  It has to live inside of a container provided by application/web servers, just as applets are managed by a browser.  For example, you can download and install Glassfish, Tomcat, or Jboss. 

Start the web/application server.  Start the browser and visit http://localhost:8080 to confirm the server is running.  Your server may use a different web server port.  If you are not sure, try 8080 first.

2.  Copy the war file (say, helloworld.war) to the autodeploy directory of the application/web server.

It's so called auto-deploy or hot-deploy.  If you can't find such a directory in your server, look again.  If it's really not there, stop using this server immediately.  Althoug auto-deploy is not required by J2EE standards, virtually all servers support this.  Why choose an inferior one when you have so many choices?  See how easy it is to deploy a war file to Glassfish.

3.  In the browser visit http://localhost:8080/helloworld/

This is the root of your helloworld web application.  You may see errors in the browser if helloworld.war doesn't have welcome page (usually index.html, index.jsp, index.htm), and the server has disabled directory listing.

For individual JSP pages, you can access  http://localhost:8080/helloworld/say.jsp, assuming say.jsp is packaged directly inside the war file (that is, not under any subdirectory in the war file).

For individual Servlets, you can visit http://localhost:8080/helloworld/hello, assuming you have configured such a servlet-mapping for the url-pattern (/hello) and this servlet.  Usually you have to map the Servlet to a url-pattern in web.xml, and when you visit this url, the Servlet will be invoked.

technorati tags: run+war+file

Posted at 09:01AM Mar 30, 2006 by chengfang in Glassfish  |  Comments[5]