google app engine, java: perform action before dev server is killed

Question

I am killing my Google App Engine dev server with kill . I would like to clean up some local changes before the server dies. How can I do it?

Answer 1

To kill dev server you can simply press control-c as the docs state:

To stop the web server, press Control-C (on Windows, Mac or Linux).

Control-c is in Unix systems sends the SIGINT signal, which you can achieve manually via kill -SIGINT <pid> .

This should gracefully shutdown the server - in this case you can install a lifecycle listener to get called when server shuts down. Just implement the contextDestroyed(..) method as shown in this example and register it in your web.xml .

NOTE: such shutdown hook does NOT work on production server (verified). I never tried it on dev server, but it should work as this is plain Jetty.