What is the recommended way to develop wars for an embedded jetty server in eclipse?

I'm working on a set of independent applications that share some common endpoints. The way I have it setup is to have each application be an independent war, and to have an embedded jetty server which provides those common endpoints. The embedded jetty server sets up the endpoints and loads the wars upon start. Each of our customers will have different applications installed, but will always have the common part, hence the need to have independently installable application wars.

This basic architecture is working ok, but in the development cycle I need to build each of the applications war to then run the whole thing with the embedded jetty server. I would like for the whole thing just to auto deploy when changes are made to any of the application files.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

Use a DeploymentManager with a WebAppProvider to find the webapps and deploy them (it will auto-redeploy on change).

Then setup your deployment to use exploded webapp directories, not war files.

You can even opt to setup deployment XML's in a single place, pointing to the contents of each webapp project's target/${project.build.finalName} directory (if using maven).

This works for many things, but not ALL things.

If you change classes or libs then there's a category of issues around memory leaks, and pinned classloaders, that can result in your reloaded webapp not behaving as you expect.

See
https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/documentation/current/preventing-memory-leaks.html