Grails 4, Ubuntu 20, Embedded Tomcat - No Multipart files in request

Question

I have been attempting to solve an issue with a prod environment deployment of a grails 4 application for about a week now. When I run my application locally, via run-app or java -jar warfile.war, I am able to upload files and have the multipart content available in my controller. When I deploy run the application on a lightsail ubuntu 20 server, for some reason the parts are simply not there.

UI form code:

<form id="file-form-${attrs.id}" enctype="multipart/form-data">
        <input style="display:none;" id="${attrs.id}-file" type="file" name="file"
               accept="image/png, image/jpeg, image/tiff"/>
    </form>

UI ajax/js code:

var jForm = new FormData($('#file-form-'+id)[0]);
        jForm.append("uploadField", $("#file-form-"+id).find('input[type="file"]').get(0).files[0]);

        $.ajax({
            url: '/files/uploadImage',
            type: "POST",
            data: jForm,
            enctype: 'multipart/form-data',
            processData: false,
            cache: false,
            contentType: false
        }).done(function(data) {
            // ...
        }).fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus) {
            // ...
        });

Controller (please note that all of the log statements are here to get clarity, it is pretty ugly as written and will be cleaned up once clarity is achieved):

    def uploadImage() {
        try {
            log.debug("FilesController.uploadImage: IN for user ${session.user?.id}")
            if (request instanceof MultipartHttpServletRequest) {
                MultipartHttpServletRequest rqst = (MultipartHttpServletRequest) request
                def myFile = params['uploadField']
                params.each { k, v ->
                    log.debug("params k ${k}, v ${v}")
                }
                request.requestHeaders.each {k, v ->
                    log.debug("headers k ${k}, v ${v}")
                }
                def f
                log.debug("parts " + request.parts?.size())
                request.parts.each {part ->
                    log.debug("part ${part.name}")
                    if (f == null) f = part
                }
                log.debug("fileNames: ${request.getFileNames()}")
                request.getFileNames().each { String fileName ->
                    log.debug("fileName: ${fileName}")
                }
                request.fileMap.each { String name, MultipartFile file ->
                    log.debug("Looping fileMap: name: ${name} and file ${file}")
                    if (f == null) f = file
                }
                log.debug('file: ' + f)
                if (f == null) f = myFile
                log.debug('file: ' + f)

                log.debug("FilesController.uploadImage: calling imageService for user ${session.user?.id} ")
                log.debug("imageService " + imageService)
                File file = imageService.saveImage(f, session.user)
                render text: file?.id
                return
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            log.error("FilesController.uploadImage: error ${e.getMessage()}")
        }
        render text: ''
    }

Logs (in prod):2020-12-07 18:11:51.977 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : FilesController.uploadImage: IN for user uuid-xxxxx 2020-12-07 18:11:51.978 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : params k controller, v files 2020-12-07 18:11:51.978 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : params k format, v null 2020-12-07 18:11:51.978 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : params k action, v uploadImage 2020-12-07 18:11:51.980 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k host, v [xxx.com] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.980 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k connection, v [keep-alive] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.980 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k content-length, v [3477461] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.980 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k accept, v [*/*] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.981 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k x-requested-with, v [XMLHttpRequest] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.981 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k user-agent, v [Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/87.0.4280.67 Safari/537.36] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.981 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k content-type, v [multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryNqkRdP2KDJ3aJYMb] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.981 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k origin, v [https://example.com] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.981 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k sec-fetch-site, v [same-origin] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k sec-fetch-mode, v [cors] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k sec-fetch-dest, v [empty] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k referer, v [https://example.com/toolsList/list?toolSetID=2c9a8202763005520176300c0254001d] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k accept-encoding, v [gzip, deflate, br] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k accept-language, v [en-US,en;q=0.9] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.982 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : headers k cookie, v [pvisitor=ff1209b4-edb0-4246-b877-8e42fe356908; JSESSIONID=C8C338FA7AC3DA7F0A967492864939BF] 2020-12-07 18:11:51.983 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : parts 0 2020-12-07 18:11:51.983 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : fileNames: java.util.LinkedHashMap$LinkedKeyIterator@5f7cb675 2020-12-07 18:11:51.983 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : file: null 2020-12-07 18:11:51.983 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : file: null 2020-12-07 18:11:51.984 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : FilesController.uploadImage: calling imageService for user uuid-xxx 2020-12-07 18:11:51.984 DEBUG --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.FilesController : imageService xxx.files.ImageService@5c93194d 2020-12-07 18:11:51.985 INFO --- [nio-8443-exec-2] xxx.files.ImageService : FilesService.saveImage: IN for uuid-xxx named null 2020-

Locally, there is a file there.

In my application.yml:

grails:
    disableCommonsMultipart: false
    web:
        disable:
            multipart: false

I have no idea why the file content is being received in my local environment but not in the production environment. I cannot imagine that aws lightsail would be stripping content from the https request. Locally, I am using http rather than https, not sure why that would matter.

Any ideas? Thank you in advance for any insight you could provide.

Answer 1

Ultimately, the problem turned out to be ssl related. The grails version I am using is 4.0.3. For that version, the embedded tomcat dependency is org.springframework.boo:spring-boot-starter-tomcat and the version being pulled is 2.1.13.RELEASE. That spring boot library leverages tomcat version 9.0.31. Once I located this article, Multipart file upload using spring boot with tomcat version 9.0.31 is failing, it was a matter of specifying a tomcat version which fixes the issue with parsing multipart files on ssl:

compile "org.apache.tomcat.embed:tomcat-embed-websocket:9.0.33"
compile "org.apache.tomcat.embed:tomcat-embed-core:9.0.33"
compile "org.apache.tomcat.embed:tomcat-embed-el:9.0.33"
compile "org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-juli:9.0.33"
compile "org.apache.tomcat:tomcat-annotations-api:9.0.33"

I hope it saves someone else some time. Peace.