Getting Started

Jetty is distributed in an artifact that expands in a directory called $JETTY_HOME, which should not be modified.

Configuration for Jetty is typically done in a directory called $JETTY_BASE. There may be more than one $JETTY_BASE directories with different configurations.

The following commands can be used to set up a $JETTY_BASE directory that supports deployment of *.war files and a clear-text HTTP connector:

The last command creates a $JETTY_BASE/start.d/ directory and other directories that contain the configuration of the server, including the $JETTY_BASE/webapps/ directory, in which standard *.war files can be deployed.

To deploy Jetty’s demo web applications, run this command:

Now you can start the Jetty server with:

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 to see the demo web applications deployed in Jetty.

The Jetty server can be stopped with ctrl+c in the terminal window.

The following sections will guide you in details about downloading, installing and starting Jetty, and deploying your web applications to Jetty.

Read the Jetty architecture section for more information about Jetty modules, $JETTY_HOME, $JETTY_BASE and how to customize and start Jetty.

The Eclipse Jetty distribution is available for download from https://jetty.org/download.html

The Eclipse Jetty distribution is available in both zip and gzip formats; download the one most appropriate for your system, typically zip for Windows and gzip for other operating systems.

After the download, unpacking Eclipse Jetty will extract the files into a directory called jetty-home-VERSION, where VERSION is the version that you downloaded, for example 11.0.25-SNAPSHOT, so that the directory is called jetty-home-11.0.25-SNAPSHOT.

Unpack Eclipse Jetty compressed file in a convenient location, for example under /opt.

The rest of the instructions in this documentation will refer to this location as $JETTY_HOME, or ${jetty.home}.

If you are new to Jetty, you should read the Jetty architecture section to become familiar with the terms used in this documentation. Otherwise, you can jump to the section on starting Jetty.

Eclipse Jetty as a standalone server has no graphical user interface, so configuring and running the server is done from the command line.

Recall from the architecture section that Jetty is based on modules, that provides features, and on $JETTY_BASE, the place where you configure which module (and therefore which feature) you want to enable, and where you configure module parameters.

Jetty is started by executing $JETTY_HOME/start.jar from within a $JETTY_BASE directory, so first we need to create a $JETTY_BASE:

If you try to start Jetty from an empty $JETTY_BASE you get:

Jetty exited complaining that there are no modules enabled, since the $JETTY_BASE you just created is empty and therefore there is no configuration to read to assemble the Jetty server.

However, it shows that start.jar takes parameters, whose details can be found in this section.

You can explore what modules are available out of the box via:

Let’s try to enable the http module (see also this section for additional information):

Now you can start Jetty:

Note how Jetty is listening on port 8080 for clear-text HTTP/1.1 connections.

After having enabled the http module, the $JETTY_BASE directory looks like this:

In the http.ini file you can find the following content (among other content):

You can change the module property jetty.http.port value directly from the command line:

To make this change persistent, you can edit the http.ini file, uncomment the module property jetty.http.port and change its value to 9999:

If you restart Jetty, the new value will be used:

Note how Jetty is now listening on port 9999 for clear-text HTTP/1.1 connections.

The Jetty server is now up and running, but it has no web applications deployed, so it just replies with 404 Not Found to every request. It is time to deploy your web applications to Jetty.

For more detailed information about the Jetty start mechanism, you can read the Jetty start mechanism section.

For the purpose of deploying web applications to Jetty, there are two types of resources that can be deployed: