configuring the root url for a Heroku Grails app - grails

Question

I'm using the Grails stack on Heroku to deploy an app. I'd like to be able to serve my app with a root of myapp.herokuapp.com/xyz as opposed to myapp.herokuapp.com, in the same way I'm able to serve from root of localhost:8080/xyz in development. I've tried adding a grails.app.context in Config.groovy like so:
environments {
production {
grails.app.context = "/xyz"
}
}
But it doesn't seem to have an effect in deployment. Do I have to configure something with Heroku? Any ideas?

Answer 1

It looks like you have to add a jetty-web.xml file to the WEB-INF directory to set the context path:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- File: web-app/WEB-INF/jetty-web.xml -->
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN" "http://jetty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd">
<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
<Set name="contextPath">/xyz</Set>
</Configure>
If this helps proper credit goes to this site, which was linked from an article on Grails and Heroku by Tomas Lin.

Answer 2

I don't think you can set context path with the current Grails build pack. If you feel like it, you can fork the build pack and hack it to support setting context (see build pack doc for more info on build packs).
Another option is to build your Grails app locally into a WAR file and deploy the WAR file using WAR deployment. The WAR deployment process will use the webapp-runner utility to run your app with Tomcat and it supports configuring the context path. Here's the help output for webapp-runner 7.0.22.3 (what I happened to have installed, might be slightly out of date):
Tomcat Runner runs a Java web application that is represented as an exploded war in a Tomcat container
Usage: java -jar tomcat-runner.jar [arguments...] path/to/webapp
Arguments:
--session-timeout The number of minutes of inactivity before a user's session is timed out
--port The port that the server will accept http requests on
--context_xml The parth to the context xml to use
--path context path (default is /)
--session_manager session store to use (valid options are 'memcache')
--session_manager_operation_timeoutoperation timeout for the memcached session manager. (default is 5000ms)
--session_manager_locking_modeSession locking mode for use with memcache session store. (default is all)
--session_manager_ignore_patternRequest pattern to not track sessions for. Valid only with memcache session store. (default is '.*\.(png|gif|jpg|css|js)$'
As explained in the WAR deploy doc, you can set webapp-runner options for your webapp using the WEBAPP_RUNNER_OPTS config var.