81.5 Deploying a WAR in an Old (Servlet 2.5) Container
Spring Boot uses Servlet 3.0 APIs to initialize the ServletContext
(register Servlets
etc.) so you can’t use the same application out of the box in a Servlet 2.5 container. It is however possible to run a Spring Boot application on an older container with some special tools. If you include org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-legacy
as a dependency (maintained separately to the core of Spring Boot and currently available at 1.0.2.RELEASE), all you should need to do is create a web.xml
and declare a context listener to create the application context and your filters and servlets. The context listener is a special purpose one for Spring Boot, but the rest of it is normal for a Spring application in Servlet 2.5. Example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"> <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value>demo.Application</param-value> </context-param> <listener> <listener-class>org.springframework.boot.legacy.context.web.SpringBootContextLoaderListener</listener-class> </listener> <filter> <filter-name>metricFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class> </filter> <filter-mapping> <filter-name>metricFilter</filter-name> <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping> <servlet> <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name> <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class> <init-param> <param-name>contextAttribute</param-name> <param-value>org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT</param-value> </init-param> <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup> </servlet> <servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> </web-app>
In this example we are using a single application context (the one created by the context listener) and attaching it to the DispatcherServlet
using an init parameter. This is normal in a Spring Boot application (you normally only have one application context).