Farms and web-app specific properties

Web-app specific properties scope

Farm does not define any farm-wide web-app-specific properties, like contextPath, initParameter etc. Instead, it applies web-app specific properties, defined in gretty configurations, to their respective web-apps:

ProjectA:

gretty {
  contextPath: '/abc'
}

ProjectB:

gretty {
  contextPath: '/def'
}

farm project:

farm {
  webapp ':ProjectA'
  webapp ':ProjectB'
}

When you invoke gradle farmRun, Gretty starts ProjectA with context "/abc" and ProjectB with context "/def".

Web-app specific properties override

Farms support a mechanism for overriding any web-app-specific properties:

gretty {
  contextPath = '/abc'
}

farm {
  webapp project, contextPath: '/def'
}

When you invoke gradle farmRun, it serves this web-app at context path "/def".
When you invoke gradle appRun, it serves this web-app at context path "/abc".

Mixing inplace and WAR mode

Web-app specific properties override has one interesting application - you can mix inplace and WAR mode of your web-apps at will.

By default, farmRun, farmRunDebug, farmStart, farmStartDebug tasks start all web-apps "inplace", without creating WAR-files.

By default, farmRunWar, farmRunWarDebug, farmStartWar, farmStartWarDebug tasks start all web-apps via WAR-files.

You can change this behavior with property override mechanism:

farm {
  webapp ':ProjectA'
  webapp ':ProjectB', inplace: true  // farm tasks always run it inplace
  webapp ':ProjectC', inplace: false // farm tasks always run it as WAR-file
}

When you invoke gradle farmRun for this configuration, ProjectA and ProjectB start inplace, while ProjectC starts as WAR-file.

When you invoke gradle farmRunWar for this configuration, ProjectA and ProjectC start as WAR-files, while ProjectB starts inplace.