WAR Deployment

Java web applications are commonly deployed to web containers, also called Servlet containers or application servers. Web containers manage the runtime environment and lifecycle of an application. Popular web containers include Jetty, Tomcat, and JBoss. Some hosting services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk also function as web containers.

To deploy an application to a web container, you must package it as a Web Archive (WAR) file. A WAR file is just a Java [JAR] file with a particular internal layout and a .war extension.

Step One: Prepare Your Project

When running your application locally at the REPL, you will want to have your choice of servlet container running inside your JVM, and so the servlet container, and the Pedestal adaptor for the container, will be a dependency of your project.

In this mode, you are running the servlet container _embedded within your application; you application starts and, as part of that, starts the servlet container.

For example, if you are using Jetty, then you’ll want the io.pedestal/pedestal.jetty library.

This is a perfectly fine way to run your applications in production, but since you are reading this page, you are interested in deploying as a WAR instead, and the rules are slightly different.

By contrast, a WAR file should not contain dependencies on the servlet container. At runtime, the servlet container starts up, then creates a new class loader to load your WAR. Having the servlet container’s classes present in the WAR will create deployment conflicts.

A WAR file contains all the dependencies of your application, but it should not contain any dependencies which would conflict with the web container itself.

You should ensure that your application only depends on the io.pedestal/pedestal.service library; the dependency on a container (such as pedestal.jetty) should be in a dev-only or test-only path.

Step Two: Configure Your Servlets

A WAR file must contain a special file called web.xml which tells the web container how to configure the application.

In the root directory of your project, create a file called web.xml like the following example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
         version="3.0"
         metadata-complete="true">
  <description>Pedestal HTTP Servlet</description>
  <display-name>Pedestal HTTP Servlet</display-name>
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>PedestalServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>io.pedestal.servlet.ClojureVarServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>init</param-name>
      <param-value>YOUR_APP_SERVER_NAMESPACE/servlet-init</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>service</param-name>
      <param-value>YOUR_APP_SERVER_NAMESPACE/servlet-service</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>destroy</param-name>
      <param-value>YOUR_APP_SERVER_NAMESPACE/servlet-destroy</param-value>
    </init-param>
  </servlet>
  <servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>PedestalServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
  </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Replace YOUR_APP_SERVER_NAMESPACE with the "server" namespace generated for your application by the Pedestal template. If your app is called "myapp" then this would be the namespace myapp.server.

The template-generated source file at src/myapp/server.clj should contain functions named servlet-init, servlet-destroy, and servlet-service.

Note: The url-pattern in the XML above must match the routes your Pedestal application is expected to handle and must match the conventions of your web container. For example, if you are deploying an application in the file myapp.war, a typical web container will expect it to have <url-pattern>/myapp/*</url-pattern>. Therefore, your application should have routes that begin with /myapp/.

If your application will be deployed as the "root" web application in the container, then you should leave <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> as shown in the example above. Consult the documentation of your web container for more details on Servlet mappings.

Step Three: Build the WAR (leinigen)

These instruction are out of date, surely there are Leiningen plugins to do this all?

Working from a standard Unix shell (or Cygwin on Windows), run the following commands in your project directory.

You will need both Leiningen and Maven installed to run these commands.

Getting dependencies:

lein clean
lein pom
mvn dependency:copy-dependencies -DoutputDirectory=target/war/WEB-INF/lib

Copying your application files:

mkdir -p target/war/WEB-INF/classes
cp -R src/* config/* resources/* target/war/WEB-INF/classes

Copying web.xml:

cp web.xml target/war/WEB-INF

Creating the WAR file:

jar cvf target/YOUR_APPLICATION.war -C target/war WEB-INF

Replace YOUR_APPLICATION with the name of your application.

Step Three: Build the WAR (deps.edn)

Forthcoming; but the essentials are the same: package your resources, Clojure sources, and (rarely present) compiled Java classes to target/war/WEB-INF/classes, and your dependencies to target/war/WEB-INF/lib, then zip everything up.

Step Four: Deploy

Consult the documentation of your web container to find out how to deploy an application from a WAR file. For many web containers, it may be a simple matter of copying the .war file into a "webapps" directory.