Setting JAVA_HOME for Bitnami Apache Tomcat stack as a Windows Service

tl;dr 

You can't set it to a different JAVA_HOME, you'll have to set your JAVA_HOME to the Bitnami JDK if you want a consistent JDK.

Setting the Bitnami Tomcat JAVA_HOME on Windows

The Problem

The Bitnami Tomcat stack packages it's own JDK and uses it over the existing JAVA_HOME directory.  This means that if you want a consistent JDK between your unit tests and in-container tests (and you do) you either need to set your usual JAVA_HOME to the Tomcat version or get Tomcat to use the system JAVA_HOME.

The Background

This tutorial is about the latter, as I have already installed the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) unlimited strength jurisdiction policy files into the system JAVA_HOME (as per a blog post on Suhorish!) and didn't want to do it again.

The Research

After going through several stackoverflow questions and a Bitnami community post I found that they all suggested changing the various Windows BAT files in /bin and /scripts.  This did not work.

The Experiments

Digging into the Windows Service properties I found that the tomcat7.exe is called directly, therefore bypassing all of these scripts.

I eventually decided to use Junction Link Magic to create a hard link from Bitnami/tomcatstack/java to my actual JAVA_HOME... and that didn't work.  The Tomcat service will fail with Application Error 1 and an event error of:

The tomcatstackTomcat service terminated with the following service-specific error: 

Incorrect function.

So I tried to bypass the service by calling the scripts directly, also to no avail.

The Conclusion

This led me to the tl;dr at the start of this article.  I hate admitting defeat.

Jenkins, SSH and "git plugin only support official git client" on Windows

This post will spare you some pain authenticating with Jenkins running on a Windows machine.  In particular this post is about the obstacles to getting Jenkins and Bitbucket communicating (link).

If you try to authenticate with HTTPS you get "jenkins returned status code 255: stdout: stderr: error: could not lock config file .git/config: No such file or directory".  The bug report (link) comments indicate that the problem is purely cosmetic, or caused by upgrade issues (link).  However, I couldn't get my Bitbucket / Jenkins integration working until I resolved this despite it being a fresh (unupgraded) install.  Fortunately a Stack Overflow question (link) suggested just avoiding HTTPS authentication entirely and using SSH as a work-around.

I tried verifying that Bitbucket was trying to connect to Jenkins by enabling an access log for Jenkins, but that feature seems to be Linux only (Google search).

If you try authenticating with SSH by reading the docs (link) then you can get a "git plugin only support official git client" error.  I found that this bug should be fixed (link), but with GIT plugin 2.0.1 (link) and GIT client plugin 1.6.1 (link) I still had the problem.  You can verify by looking at the source (link, line 1041).

I tried setting the GIT_SSH environment variable (link) and ensuring that Git/bin was on my path to no avail.  In contrast I had some success trying polling in the short term instead of having Bitbucket notify my Jenkins server when there was a code check-in (link).

The final solution (besides re-installing in the default location) was to use Junction Link Magic (link) to create a hard link (aka a junction in windows terminology) from the default location to the actual location.

In summary the only way to get Jenkins working correctly on Windows is to use SSH instead of the default HTTPS and with an alternate Git install location you have to create a hard link (junction) from "C:/Program Files (x86)/Git" to where you installed Git.

Not as Easy as it Looks

After trying to migrate from JSF 1.2 to 2.0 with these StackOverflow questions I found that if you're upgrading to Facelets 2.0 you also need to upgrade to Apache Trinidad 2.0.

Maven info can be found at this post at Thoean.  It's supposed to have more content, but I couldn't figure out how to get to it.

It appears that that is the best upgrade guide that I could find, and this Andy Schwartz blog post is great for what features you get when it's all over.

Part 2 is about moving from OGNL to SpEL.