-Dplantuml.include.path broken in 2019.11 when used with WAR file on jetty

Question

Hi

I have sequnce diagrams that use the !include directive extensively for maintaining consistency (skins, constants, hyperlinks)

In order to get better rendering speed, i run my own plantuml server using jetty on my mac and i pass the

-Dplantuml.include.path

argument in JAVA_OPTIONS in my .jettyrc. 

This works very well and i can switch between local rendering or server rendering without needing to change the content of my plantuml file.This broke after i updated to 2019.11 War file. So for now i have gone back to the 2019.10 version

So an example of use

!include constants.pu

(where constants.pu is a file in the folder specified by plantuml.includepath.)

This basically throws an error like below in 2019.11

Error found in diagram 0.3.1.1_-_Scheduling_-_Expedited_Scheduling
cannot include constants.pu (@ Diagram Line 1, File Line 2)
"!include constants.pu"
(Error)

Note that specifying a full url works in both 2019.10 and 2019.11 wars

e.g.

!include http://localhost:8080/include/constants.pu

But it was nicer to just specify the file directly and having a global constant deal with its actual location  as the location could be different depending on where it was deployed.

C

QUESTION 2:

Over and above - is there a way to specify include paths as URLs? i.e. as below

-Dplantuml.include.path=http://<server>:<port>/<folder>

That lends itself nicely to server deployments where i can point to the raw file in say github without needing to explicitly put the full url in every pu file in the project.

Best regards,

Bharat

Comments

OK I worked out that i can set an environment variable .e.g INCLUDE_PATH=http://<server>:<port>/<folder>/

and then i can use !include %getenv("INCLUDE_PATH)file to include it

on my local tomcat i can expose the include folder using the context path so this actually works better than include path

However it seems that %getenv is broken in 1.2019.11 - e.g. if i do %getenv("HOME") i was getting my home folder in 1.2019.10 but in 1.2019.11 it returns blank....

Any suggestions?

---

Interestingly if i take the 1.2019.10 war file and update it with the plantum.1.2019.11 jar - it still works, so i guess, so presumably the issue is somewhere else in the war file...

This gives me the latest plantuml jar, so will use this for the time being.

---

I have traced why this stopped working. This change was done on 26

https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml-server/commit/83138142c5f0f0b1111add203ebc33eda803dc47

as a resolution for this

https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml-server/issues/122

I get that this was disabled for security considerations - but there needs to be a compromise - if i am specifically plantuml.include.path then the server should allow inclusion of files only from that path and not elsewhere.

For now Setting ALLOW_PLANTUML_INCLUDE=true in my environment variables lets me work around this at the cost of security - i am running this on my local machine for my personal use so that is not a problem, but i obviously wouldn't run it on my local intranet.