Jetty 7 gives HTTP ERROR: 503 - service unavailable

Question

I am getting the error 503 when I try to start Jetty. Does anyone know what this might mean. I am running Jetty 7 and starting it with the start.jar file.

If anyone knows how to configure Jetty to work on Windows, that would be helpful. Thanks.

Answer 1

Check the log files to see if there is more useful information there. If you are not already running it from the command line, try that ("java -jar start.jar" instead of double-clicking the start.jar file). Between those two there should be information pointing you in the right direction.

Most likely what is happening is that there is a problem with the WAR file Jetty is trying to start. You will need to see a log file or other output to determine what problem it is having.

Answer 2

I was getting a 503 error when trying to get Jetty7 up and running on Windows. In my console, I had the following exception:

2009-08-11 14:39:50.150:WARN::Failed startup of context WebAppContext@66e815@66e815/,file:/C:/Documents and Settings/user/Local Settings/Temp/Jetty_0_0_0_0_8080_test.war.hcx133/webinf/;jar:file:/C:/tools/jetty7/jetty-distribution-7.0.0.RC3/webapps/test.war!/;,C:\tools\jetty7\jetty-distribution-7.0.0.RC3/webapps/test.war
java.lang.RuntimeException: java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in path at index 18: file:/C:/Documents and Settings/user/Local Settings/Temp/Jetty_0_0_0_0_8080_test.war____.hcx133/webinf/WEB-INF/lib/jetty-client-7.0.0.RC3.jar
        at org.eclipse.jetty.util.resource.Resource.getURI(Resource.java:359)
        at org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebInfConfiguration.preConfigure(WebInfConfiguration.java:105)
        at org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.doStart(WebAppContext.java:338)

Jetty must use the temp dir as a staging area for apps, and does not like a path that contains whitespace. I worked around this by altering the java.io.tmpdir system property at jvm start:

java -Djava.io.tmpdir=C:\temp -jar start.jar