uPortal IRC Logs-2009-02-12

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[10:14:58 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> Greetings uPortal People: Does someone here know what the cause of this error is? Caused by: org.apache.pluto.PortletContainerException: Unable to obtain the servlet context for the portlet app context path [/googleportlet]. Make sure that the portlet app has been deployed, and that cross context support is enabled for the portal app.
[10:24:19 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I know if probably won't load but shoudl I be able to tell if the context is loaded by navigating to http://myhost:8080/googleportlet ?
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[10:46:20 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> if you enable the tomcat manager, you could verify the webapp that contains that portlet is started from there.
[10:46:41 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> you can also look inside of your tomcat logs for an indication of whether a webapp is failing to start for some reason.
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[11:20:37 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> our web administrators yanked the manager app.
[11:21:13 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> we are deploying on a different server than the one we do builds.
[11:23:42 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> so the requirements is to drop in the war artifacts to the tomcat deploy folder and then start up the server.
[11:24:44 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> uportal requires a special tomcat configuration context.
[11:25:17 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> special only meaning, that it declares the database connection pool and the cross context parts
[11:28:21 EST(-0500)] <awills> i think those issues have been evolving in recent uP versions... i think that – for trunk – the only config i've done to tomcat iself (not in uP webapp) are the 2 items descrobed here: http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPM30/01+Tomcat
[11:30:09 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> hmm... maybe, but the last time I saw that cross context problem, it was because the uportal tomcat context config wasn't done right.
[11:31:14 EST(-0500)] * awills should read the conversation that happened before he entered the room
[11:31:15 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> so is the special tomcat configuration context for the uPortal webapp?
[11:31:32 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> what version of uPortal are you using?
[11:31:39 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> 3.0.2
[11:32:14 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> which version of tomcat?
[11:32:21 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> 6
[11:32:44 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> and what command are you using to deploy uportal+portlets to that tomcat?
[11:34:20 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> just letting the uPortal.war expand in the deploy folder webapps after starting tomcat. then adding each portlet say googleportlet.war to the webapps folder. I'm getting all of the artifacts from the uportal-ear/target/uPortal folder including the ones for the shared/lib location .
[11:36:20 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> that won't work for the portlets
[11:36:42 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> they have not had their web.xml files modified in the appropriate way
[11:38:01 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> oh wait, let me check that directory, maybe I'm thinking of a different one
[11:38:33 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> ok.
[11:38:57 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> should I get them our of the uportal-portlets-overlay/portletxyz/target ?
[11:40:04 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I see that the deployPortlet -Dportletname=myportlet runs through a castor xml file process via the pluto plugin.
[11:40:05 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> well where you got them from seems ok, but I don't know that I can explain your error
[11:40:31 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> other then that's not the normal deployment process so it feels like something must be going wrong
[11:40:46 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I know this is not the standard way of deploying the portal app and portlets themselves.
[11:43:04 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I see some output from the ant deployPortletApp that referes to the castor-web-xml-mapping.xml
[11:53:20 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> the link that awills put up earlier, did you make sure to make that change regarding shared libs?
[11:53:44 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/UPM30/01+Tomcat
[11:54:13 EST(-0500)]

[11:56:38 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I just put in a request to our admins to add the emptySessionPath="true" attribute to the connector. I'm hoping that is the issue. We do have catalina.properties functioning correctly because the the portal does load but just not the portlets.
[11:58:03 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> the emptysessionpath will not affect the google portlet (or most of the portlets that ship with uportal)
[11:59:12 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> maybe they have some tomcat configuration tuned in such a way as to prevent webapps from crosscontext communication, even if they request it
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[12:18:53 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> ok. so I removed the googleportlet from the webapps folder to undeploy it and then did a redeploy : http://uportal.pastebin.com/m516c9af5
[12:19:44 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> according to the logs the deploy seemed to work. but adding the portlet on the front end gives the error pasted above.
[12:23:56 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> and you did a tomcat restart after all of that?
[12:24:31 EST(-0500)] <holdorph> pluto spans the entire tomcat container, you typically, will have to restart all of tomcat to correctly undeploy a portlet.
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[13:45:36 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> just read the logs ...
[13:45:41 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> invisibill: did you get your stuff figured out?
[13:45:49 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and a few clarifications
[13:46:09 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> in uPortal 3.x tomcat configuration is included in uPortal/META-INF/context.xml
[13:46:34 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> you don't have to restart tomcat to undeploy a portlet in 3.x, pluto dynamically loads and unloads portlet descriptor information
[13:47:10 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> you still have to run a portlet WAR through the uPortal deployPortletApp ant task prior to deploying it
[13:47:48 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> if you don't have the shared.loader line in catalina.properties uPortal won't start since it won't be able to find the pluto libs
[13:55:51 EST(-0500)] <awills> hope you got some sleep eric
[13:57:24 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> on yeah
[13:57:32 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> got the releases done by 11
[13:57:40 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> almost done with a 3.1.0-M2 vendor branch merge here
[13:57:52 EST(-0500)] <awills> nice work
[13:59:01 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> thanks, it will be good to get the merge done
[13:59:08 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> it will fix a few bugs we've been dealing with
[13:59:52 EST(-0500)] <awills> good deal... bb in the afternoon
[14:27:01 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> athena7: you around?
[14:27:41 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> anyone know the easiest way to get variables into the portal theme XSL from like a .properties file?
[14:33:23 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> Hi EricDalquist. I've still got the issue. I read through this post which has the same error trace as mine http://www.nabble.com/duke-rss-tabbed-portlet-td21728541.html
[14:34:19 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I tried creating / configuring another instance of the BookmarksPortlet as a Portlet in the portlet manager app.
[14:37:13 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I get through the configuration ok with no errors the portlet web application path is set to /BookmarksPortlet and the uPortal/META-INF/context.xml is the default which has crossContext="true" set.
[14:37:20 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I can look at the tomcat manager app and see the context for /BookmarksPortlet. We have the same issue for the RssPortlet and googleportlet portlets.
[14:38:54 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> ok, so how are you building the portlet WAR file and how are you getting that WAR file into Tomcat?
[14:38:54 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> how is the bookmarks portlet WAR file built
[14:38:55 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and how does it end up in tomcat/webapps
[14:38:57 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> invisibill: can you answer my two questions?
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[14:42:12 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I'm doing bulids now like this 'mvn clean install -Pdev -Dmaven.test.skip=true' and the -Pdev profile database info is in the root pom.xml for each environment. Afer that runs I copy uPortal.war googleportlet.war, RssPortlet.war and BookmarksPortlet.war from uportal-ear/target/uPortal/ to our stopped tomcat container which (in the dev environment) is on the same server located in /usr/local/tomcat/webapps. I then
[14:43:13 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> uPortal itself starts ok, and there is now startup error for the portlets but when I try to add them to a page I get the error posted here.
[14:44:33 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> well, I think the pluto assembly has been done on the .war files once they are in uportal-ear/target/uPortal
[14:45:05 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> you can verify that by looking at the web.xml file from one of those WARs and making sure there is one or more >org.apache.pluto.core.PortletServlet< entries
[14:45:11 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> for a servlet
[14:45:16 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I cant tell from the deployPortlet ant target if they are just being extracted to the tmp folder and copied to tomcat.
[14:45:32 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I'll check.
[14:46:03 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> so that is why I was asking, portlets bundled with uPortal have the correct maven project config in the overlay which adds the pluto bits
[14:46:24 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> running the deployPortletApp target is how you add the pluto bits to a WAR that isn't bundled with the portal
[14:47:52 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> looking at the exploded BookmarksPortlet (which I did not run through the ant deployPortletApp) I do see <servlet> <servlet-name>BookmarksPortlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.apache.pluto.core.PortletServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>portlet-name</param-name> <param-value>BookmarksPortlet</param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet
[14:48:01 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> that's right
[14:48:35 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I was thinking that something in the database maybe configured to an old portlet id?
[14:49:17 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> So I tried to make a new instance of it in the Portlet Manager front end as a 168 portlet but the same error.
[14:50:19 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> you should be able to browse to content in a deployed portlet directly:
[14:50:19 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> https://my-demo.doit.wisc.edu/BookmarkPortlets/img/folder-closed.gif
[14:50:34 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> if that works then Tomcat is deploying the webapp
[14:53:12 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I don't see a "content" folder at the top level of the war or in WEB-INF . I do see a jsp folder and a few others.
[14:53:49 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> I just meant content as in some files in the portlet
[14:54:39 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> ok. I do see files and from the catalina.out log, the pastebin of mine earlier, I appears to deploy correctly from tomcats perspective.
[14:55:47 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I was looking for a way to maybe restart a portlet from the front side. Is there something like that in there?
[14:56:58 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> well restarting it wouldn't really do anything
[14:56:58 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I do see these portlets in the front side from the portlet manager, but I'm not sure if that just means there is data in the db for them.
[14:56:58 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> what the error message you posted is stating is that when uPortal tries to do a ServletContext.getContext("/BookmarkPortlets"); call it is returning null
[14:56:58 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> meaning either Tomcat is not letting the call happen due to some configuration problem
[14:57:06 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> or there is no successfully deployed webapp at /BookmarkPortlets
[14:57:36 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> portlet manager is just a dumb front end and just displays what is in uportal's database
[14:58:07 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> one of the nice open feature requests would be for it to better integrate into the Pluto portlet registry APIs and show you what portlets Pluto thinks are deployed
[14:58:29 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> have your admins done any custom configuration in Tomcat's servlet.xml or default web.xml files?
[14:58:32 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I do get a 404 going here http://host:8080/BookmarksPortlet/
[14:58:41 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> should I be getting something
[14:58:52 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> no, there is no default content for the portlet
[14:59:04 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> right.
[15:00:18 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> no custom configuration in tomcat that I see. We are new to tomcat 6 but other than enabling the shared/lib with catalina.properties and setting the connector session sharing thats it.
[15:00:56 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> they are using mod_jk infront of tomcat though but I can access the portal
[15:01:22 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> so what is the full URL (with censored host) for an image in the bookmarks portlet that you can see
[15:02:35 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://dude:8080/BookmarksPortlet/img/edit.gif loads a green pencil
[15:02:53 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://host/BookmarksPortlet/img/edit.gif
[15:03:04 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://piglet.uchicago.edu:8080/BookmarksPortlet/img/ edit.gif
[15:03:31 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and you're using "/BookmarksPortlet" as the portlet app context when publishing
[15:03:37 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> so much for censored host.
[15:03:48 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> oh well
[15:04:01 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and "BookmarksPortlet" for the portlet name when publishing
[15:04:14 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> well I'm copying the BookmarksPortlet.war to the deployloacation which will by default make the file name the context
[15:04:33 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> when it unpacks.
[15:04:35 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> right
[15:04:55 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> with translates to a config time value of "/BookmarksPortlet"
[15:05:00 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> If I see the image does that mean its loading.
[15:07:00 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yes
[15:07:00 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> well ... I'm 90% sure
[15:07:22 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> the top of the error stack is passing through pluto code.
[15:08:00 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yeah, its pluto code that is doing the ServletContext.getContext call
[15:08:02 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> but it is coming from the uPortal context
[15:09:28 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> Is there a way to trigger a redeploy of the portlet from the command line?
[15:09:51 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> so what are the exact values you're specifying for "Portlet Web Application Path" and "Portlet Name" on the Portlet Descriptor page in portlet manager?
[15:11:32 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> For the one I added for the bookmarks portlet I have "Portlet Web Application Path /BookmarksPortlet" and " Portlet Name BookmarksPortlet"
[15:12:37 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> um in tomcat?
[15:12:37 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> you could try "touch web.xml"
[15:12:37 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> to try and trick it into thinking the file is newer
[15:12:37 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> or "touch portletapp.war"
[15:12:39 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> I still don't think it is a problem with the deployment of the portlet though
[15:12:41 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> do you see anything related to BookmarksPortlet in catalina.out?
[15:16:33 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I touched the war file in /webapps and get this in catalina out : http://mibbit.com/pb/T9OvPb (uportal.pastebin.com isn't loading for me right now).
[15:17:12 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yeah, looks like it was registered with pluto
[15:17:25 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and was successfully deregistered and reregistered
[15:17:29 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> looks that way.
[15:18:19 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> from the front end then, which bookmarks portlet should I try to add to a page? The one that was there from the begining or the one who's definiiton I created as a 168 portlet?
[15:18:26 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I think both give the same error.
[15:18:58 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> try the 168 portlet just so you're sure
[15:19:13 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> ok. trying...
[15:19:53 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> make sure you use "/BookmarksPortlet" and "BookmarksPortlet" exactly
[15:21:07 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://mibbit.com/pb/LOea4d that is for adding the instance of the bookmarks portlet as a 168 portlet definition.
[15:22:50 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> maybe something with my spring configuration?
[15:24:30 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> something isn't right with tomcat, pluto or uPortal
[15:24:30 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> can you verify that there is a uPortal/META-INF/context.xml file?
[15:24:47 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> the first line in it should look like: <Context crossContext="true" reloadable="false">
[15:25:24 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/ should be empty
[15:26:21 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://mibbit.com/pb/SkOHJy and the Catalina/localhost is empty.
[15:26:46 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> what is in tomcat/shared/lib?
[15:27:51 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> http://mibbit.com/pb/KeIZtb in /shared/lib
[15:29:22 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> I'm at a loss
[15:29:22 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> uPortal is finding the pluto libs
[15:29:22 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> so shared/lib must be configured correctly
[15:29:35 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> but for some reason it is failing to find portlets
[15:30:00 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> have you used a Tomcat 6 install on a local machine and used 'ant deploy-ear' on it?
[15:30:59 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I have a few days ago and it worked.
[15:31:38 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I can go back to the local build and try deploying just the wars there and verify that it works as well.
[15:32:22 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> This will be on a fresh install of tomcat.
[15:33:25 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yeah ... at this point I don't know what else to say
[15:33:31 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> try a local clean tomcat 6 install
[15:33:43 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> use the deploy-ear ant task
[15:34:04 EST(-0500)] <EricDalquist> if you can get that working then it is a matter of figuring out what is different between the two environments
[15:34:08 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> ok. no problem. were using virtual machine images for the local builds.
[15:34:32 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> I can start with a blank slate pretty easily.
[15:38:53 EST(-0500)] <invisibill> BTW thanks for your help in debugging this so far
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