Reset Your Application – wget and Ant

Monday 11 June 2007 - Filed under Code

I'm using Ant now to do all my deployment to our servers. Today I decided to see if I could use wget to reset my application after a build. I like to do this just to make sure after I deploy a new build - that everything is reset in case I added something that needs to be set/reset in the application scope.

First I downloaded wget for Windows. There seem to be a lot of versions of wget floating around but I picked this version because it has SSL/HTTPS support compiled in and I need to run this against a secure server.

Simply copy the wget.exe executable into your C:\WINNT dir (on Windows XP) so that you can execute wget from any location.

In my application I have a bit of code which will reset my application if I pass a query string in the URL:

http://localhost/index.cfm?reset=true

And in my Application.cfc I have:

So I initially tried to run the same thing using wget:

C:\>wget http://localhost/survey/?reset --spider -d

A few notes on the command line switches: --spider prevents wget from downloading anything, -d - enables debug which is useful during initial testing, and -- help will display all available options.

This worked on my localhost - but when I tried it on the live server I received "ERROR 500: Internal Server Error".

After a bit of trial and error the culprit turned out to be the cflocation after the reset. When I removed that - everything worked!

So in order to work around that I added another parameter to wget - a user-agent string:

C:\>wget https://my.secure.url/index.cfm?reset --http-user=MyUsername --http-passwd=${my.password} --spider --no-check-certificate --user-agent=wgetreset --no-verbose

I'm passing in my authentication using --http-user and --http-passwd. I'm setting the value of the 'my.password' property earlier when I checkout my code from SVN - see this post for more information. I also set the user-agent string using --user-agent=wgetreset.

Now I simply modified my application.cfc to prevent the cflocation from firing if the request was made via wget:

And finally in my build.xml file I added a new target to perform the reset:

This runs at the end of my build. It executes wget and dumps the results of the command into a property ${wget.output} which I then check to see if it ran OK or if there was an error.

2007-06-11  »  Jim Priest