Debugging gradle jettyRun in IntelliJ

I was trying to figure out how to attach a debugger to the jetty server launched by running an app from gradle jettyRun. It turned out not to be so straight forward, but here's what I did.

Step 1 - Upgrade to IntelliJ 13 if you're not there already. The gradle support has significantly improved.

Step 2 - Create a new Jetty Server (Remote) configuration. Gradle uses an embedded jetty server, but you need to point IntelliJ at the home folder of a Jetty installation. I downloaded Jetty 6.125 (Gradle 1.10 uses Jetty 6, this may change with newer versions) and pointed at that.

Step 3 - Configure the Jetty Server. I used the following values, but your may change them as needed.

Server tab:
- Application Server: Jetty 6.125
- JMX port: 2099
- Remote Staging type and host are both Same file system
- Remote connection (where your app is running) defaults to localhost:8080

Startup/Connection tab (Select Debug configuration):
- Port: 52252 (default)
- Transport: Socket (default)
- The window will show the parameters you will need to pass to GRADLE_OPTS (or however you get properties to gradle, such as through gradle.properties). These properties are in addition to other properties in gradle.

Step 4 - Create (or modify your existing one if you have) a jetty config file and point your jetty tasks at it as shown in http://blog.james-carr.org/2011/12/20/enabling-jmx-in-gradles-jetty-plugin/. I did not have a jetty-env file.

Step 5 - Start your gradle process from the command line with the following opts (or again here, in gradle.properties):

export GRADLE_OPTS="-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=1099 -Dcom.sumanagement.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -DOPTIONS=jmx -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=52252,suspend=n,server=y -javaagent:/opt/idea-IU-133.1122/plugins/Groovy/lib/agent/gragent.jar"


Note the -Xdebug and opts after that come from the arguments in the Startup/Connection tab in Step 3.

Step 6 - Once your app has started, start the jetty configuration from IntelliJ in Debug mode. Run your webapp, and your code should now stop at breakpoints in IntelliJ. Very many thanks to the StackOverflow's @CrazyCoder (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14825546/deploy-debug-remote-jetty-with-intellij-12) and James Carr for his blog post referenced above.