Strangeness when deploying JRuby app under Jetty

Question

This problem is maddening and I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

I'm trying to deploy an instance of Redmine to a Jetty servlet. I've created the war using Warbler, have created the context, and it seems to deploy. Unfortunately, I see the following behaviors:

If I access my app at its configured hostname's /, I see a directory listing of the webapp directory.

If I access the app by sending a GET request to /braillewizard (the context name) with a configured hostname sent, the app is run.

If I send a request to /braillewizard with a Host: header not included in the list of hostnames, the app is not run and I get a 404.

So it would seem like I have virtual hosting partially configured correctly, but something isn't quite right. The especially annoying thing is that I am running a similar setup fine on two other systems, including one which runs Redmine, and everything works fine.

The only difference I can think of for this one system is that I'm setting up a vhost for the system's FQDN whereas on other systems the hosts are on incidental domains. Not sure if that is a factor, but my attempts to get rid of the context configuration and go with the app in /root still seem to require a GET of /root.

I'm also telnetting directly to the Jetty server, so this isn't a problem with my front-end web server.

Here is my context configuration:

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
  <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home"/>/webapps/braillewizard.war</Set>
  <Set name="contextPath">/</Set>
  <Set name="virtualHosts">
    <Array type="java.lang.String">
      <Item>braillewizard.org</Item>
      <Item>www.braillewizard.org</Item>
    </Array>
  </Set>
</Configure>

And my web.xml, generated by Warbler:

<!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC
  "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
  "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd"&gt;
<web-app>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>rails.env</param-name>
    <param-value>production</param-value>
  </context-param>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>public.root</param-name>
    <param-value>/</param-value>
  </context-param>


  <filter>
    <filter-name>RackFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.jruby.rack.RackFilter</filter-class>
  </filter>
  <filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RackFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
  </filter-mapping>

  <listener>
    <listener-class>org.jruby.rack.rails.RailsServletContextListener</listener-class>
  </listener>


</web-app>

If there's anything else I might provide, then please let me know. I've been googling for a solution for hours and not finding anything.

Edit: OK, here are a few more details. The idea that /context worked wasn't exactly true. Rather, the app was failing to load and I couldn't see the exception for some reason. Various tweaks later and the problem seems slightly different.

It seems that / isn't running whatever route is attached to / in the Rails app. Rather, it's triggering a directory listing for the webapp folder. If I visit a URL in my app directly, other than / of course, everything seems to work nicely.

Calling Jetty with -DDEBUG as a JVM arg seems to indicate that RackHandler is being hit, then is falling through to the default handler. This would seem consistent with a handler not running, but I'm not sure why I see the behavior in one version of this deployment and not another.

Answer 1

It's been suggested to me that this behavior is due to a bug introduced in the JRuby Rack adapter 1.0.2, and that the fix involves downgrading to 1.0.1. While I have yet to test this solution, it is consistent with why the version on one server might work while it fails on another.

I'll try that and update this question with the results later, but right now this problem has pretty much sapped my will to mess with this stuff for a while. :) For the moment it works because I have a URL rewrite in place, and that's good enough for me.

Answer 2

I also had this problem deploying a Rails app using Warbler with Jetty. The fix that worked for me was to set the dirAllowed parameter on the default servlet to false, i.e.

<init-param>
  <param-name>dirAllowed</param-name>
  <param-value>false</param-value>
</init-param>

I think the default behaviour is to fall through from 'can't find welcome file' to 'show a directory listing' - changing this parameter causes the request to be dispatched to your Rails app instead.