Serve files from folder outside web application in Jetty

Question

I have a Java web application (Eclipse/OSGI) on a Jetty server. I want to be able to serve static files to my web application from a folder outside of the web root. In my web application, I don't yet know the file name of the file I want to be served, so I want to take the filename (and/or path) as a VM parameter when I start my web application. For example:

I have an image - myImg.jpg - that I have put in a folder on the server file system, for example root/images/myImg.jpg. I want to take this as a VM parameter, e.g. "-DmyImg=/images/myImg.jpg/" so that I can get the image and display it on my web page. How can I accomplish this? Can I do this without creating a new Servlet?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I'm trying to use a ContextHandler in the jetty.xml config file, in which I point the baseResource to the actual folder on the file system, but when I try to access it through the contextPath the resource is "null". — Farna, Nov 29 '11 at 13:58

score 11 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 30 '11 at 09:08

Solved it!

This is what I added to my jetty.xml file:

<Set name="handler">
    <New id="Handlers" class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerCollection">
        <Set name="handlers">
            <Array type="org.eclipse.jetty.server.Handler">
                <Item>
                    <New class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler">
                        <Set name="contextPath">/myContextPath</Set>
                        <Set name="handler">
                            <New class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ResourceHandler">
                                <Set name="directoriesListed">false</Set>
                                <Set name="resourceBase">/actual/folder/on/file/system</Set>
                            </New>
                        </Set>
                    </New>
                </Item>
                [...other handlers...]
            </Array>
        </Set>
    </New>
</Set>

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 30 '12 at 19:04

@Farna: In your answer I am not able to understand how you are passing the file name as VM parameter. This is what I did.

I created testparvez.xml file in jetty webapps directory.

    <?xml version="1.0"  encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN" "http://jetty.eclipse.org/configure.dtd">

<Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler">
  <Set name="contextPath">/testparvez</Set>
  <Set name="resourceBase"><SystemProperty name="mydir"/></Set>
  <Set name="handler">
    <New class="org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ResourceHandler">
      <Set name="welcomeFiles">
        <Array type="String">
          <Item><SystemProperty name="myfile"/></Item>
        </Array>
      </Set>
      <Set name="cacheControl">max-age=3600,public</Set>
    </New>
  </Set>
</Configure>

Then I start jetty as

java -jar start.jar jetty.port=8082 -Dmydir=C:/test/javadoc/ -Dmyfile=index.html

And finally I access from url http://localhost:8082/testparvez/

Serve files from folder outside web application in Jetty

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