Booting Lift from command line and finding templates in webapp

[Brett Grace]

I occasionally want to write CLI tools (diagnostics, maintenance, reports, etc) that share code and config with my Lift app. In general it seems to work if I do something like this:

trait ManagementCommand extends App with Loggable {

  new Boot().boot
  val session : LiftSession = new LiftSession("", StringHelpers.randomString(20), Empty)

}

object SomeTask extends ManagementCommand {

    S.initIfUninitted(session) {
        SomeSystem.doStuff()
    }
    System.exit(0)
}

I'm using sbt-native-packager so I can run it like so:

my-project -main code.management.SomeTask

However, one of my tasks is generating an email from a template. In this case, it can't find the template because I'm not running inside a servlet container that provides a ClassLoader which looks inside the webapp directory (I know the templates are there, because if I modify the code to explicitly prepend "webapp" to the path, it works).

Is there an easy way to make this work (aside from providing a custom ClassLoader), or is there a better approach for doing offline transactions? For the most part, I just want to share configuration and be able to run database queries that expect a session.

Thank you in advance.

[Brett Grace]

Okay, if I have this in my build.sbt then it works, although it seems a little ugly:

import NativePackagerHelper._
enablePlugins(JavaAppPackaging)
scriptClasspath += "../webapp"
mappings in Universal ++= directory("src/main/webapp")

It copies the contents of webapp into the distribution directory, and then adds that directory to the classpath in the bash script which is automatically created by sbt-native-packager. It seems like supplying my own LiftRules.getResource is the only other viable option, unless I'm missing some bit of configuration somewhere. Other ideas welcome.

[Antonio Salazar Cardozo]

That sounds about right in terms of available options, yeah :/

Thanks,

Antonio

[Brett Grace]

Antonio,

Good to know, thank you for replying to confirm my suspicions.

Brett