WebSphere Liberty Profile - Where's my stuff ?

I saw this: -

[14/02/17 10:50:51:653 GMT] 0000002b com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp                               W SRVE0190E: File not found: /foo.jsp
[14/02/17 10:50:51:744 GMT] 0000002b com.ibm.ws.logging.internal.impl.IncidentImpl                I FFDC1015I: An FFDC Incident has been created: "com.ibm.ws.jsp.webcontainerext.JSPErrorReport: JSPG0036E: Failed to find resource /foo.jsp com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.FilterInstanceWrapper.doFilter 144" at ffdc_17.02.14_10.50.51.0.log
[14/02/17 10:53:03:226 GMT] 0000004f com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.extension                            W SRVE0190E: File not found: /login.html

on my local installation of WebSphere Liberty Profile (WLP) on my Mac.

What was strange was that the so-called missing files were definitely there.

Or, to be more precise, they were here: -

 ~/Downloads/wlp/usr/servers/defaultServer/apps/expanded/DefaultWebApplication.war/

HelloHTML.jsp HelloVXML.jsp HelloWML.jsp HitCount.jsp WEB-INF banner.gif index.html loginError.jsp
HelloHTMLError.jsp HelloVXMLError.jsp HelloWMLError.jsp META-INF auth_error.jsp foo.jsp login.html logout.html

I'd checked my server.xml for the specific web application: -

    <webApplication id="DefaultWebApplication"
     location="DefaultWebApplication.war"
     name="DefaultWebApplication" suppressUncoveredHttpMethodWarning="true" contextRoot="DefaultWebApplication">
     <application-bnd>
     <security-role name="All Role" id="admin">
     <special-subject type="ALL_AUTHENTICATED_USERS"></special-subject>
     </security-role>
     </application-bnd>
    </webApplication>

and I'd proven that the context root wasn't the problem, as I *WAS* able to access certain pages, such as this: -

https://localhost:9443/DefaultWebApplication/index.html

So, to summarise my position, I had a web application deployed to Liberty, suitably referenced in server.xml serving SOME but not ALL requested pages ….

So I then dug into the file-system further …..

… and found this: -

 ~/Downloads/wlp/usr/servers/defaultServer/apps/DefaultWebApplication.war.xml 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<archive>
    <dir sourceOnDisk="/Users/davidhay/Documents/workspace/DefaultWebApplication/WebContent" targetInArchive="/"/>
    <dir sourceOnDisk="/Users/davidhay/Documents/workspace/DefaultWebApplication/ImportedClasses" targetInArchive="/WEB-INF/classes/"/>
</archive>

And that's the problem ….

This file appears to "override" what's in the server.xml file, meaning that the actual root ( from where the content is served ) is the Eclipse workspace.

I proved this by coping the missing files: -

cp ~/Downloads/wlp/usr/servers/defaultServer/apps/expanded/DefaultWebApplication.war/log* /Users/davidhay/Documents/workspace/DefaultWebApplication/WebContent/

which did the trick.

Next step is to see whether I actually need the DefaultWebApplication.war.xml file, as it's been helpfully provided by the WebSphere Developer Tools in Eclipse, with which I've been managing the WLP instance.

Fun fun fun