It’s another day, which means another gradle tip. I have been experimenting with JMX lately and using MBeanExporter to export spring beans so that I can interact with them over JMX (specifically, stopping and starting rabbitMQ consumers). I can get this working on any container easily enough but I really wanted to get it working with my locally running jetty instance launched by gradle.

First you’ll set a jettyConfig for the jettyRun task. I usually do this for both jettyRun and jettyRunWar:

The additionalRuntimeJars is needed because of a transitive dependency on mx4j. I don’t know why this is, but it is required. I add mx4j as a providedRuntime dependency along with jetty-management:

Finally you need to setup your jetty configuration to startup a JMX server. There’s a bit of freedom here with what you can do but here is one that I stole shamelessly from the jetty website:

Now run gradle jettyRun and have jconsole open a remote connection to service:jmx:rmi://localhost:2100/jndi/rmi://localhost:2099/jmxrmi and go do whatever you want to do with JMX.

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I thought I’d share another feature of gradle that i have found extremely useful, starting and stopping an embedded jetty server when my tests run. This is really useful for projects that host web services as it allows me to hit them and very the correct results plus it verifies the full stack is configured correctly. One could quite possibly also use this setup on web projects and have Geb based tests run against their project.

Given a project setup using the jetty plugin as I described in my previous post, all you need to do is hook jetty into run before and after the test task:

And that’s it. Now whenever you run gradle test the embedded jetty server will run along with your tests.

gradle jetty java groovy test automation