How to configure W3C Unicorn validator for local URIs?

Question

I often need to check unregistered websites, so you cannot use a publicly available online validator. I tried installing W3Cs Unicorn on my OSX computer (10.7) using MacPorts (because I did not want to deal with dependencies). Unfortunately, the documents for installing Unicorn are mostly missing or out of date, and the mailing list looks dead. Disclaimer: I do not know Java.

Here is what I did:

• install the Java update to 1.6.0_29 (since poisons have a current memory leak current)

• install Tomcat and dependencies (ivy is missing from the docs and does not load automatically as expected):

  sudo port install apache-ant apache-ivy tomcat6 mercurial 

• select the Python version for Mercurial; it might be better to use python.org-Python and install Mercurial there, but Ive only got Python system and MacPorts on this computer:

   sudo port select python python27 

• automatically starts Tomcat after reboot:

   sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.tomcat6.plist 

• add setting to .profile :

   export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/local/share/java/tomcat6 

• check java -version (my java -version version in "A" or "Current" was broken; java -version just hangs)

• fix Java binary path; if not $JAVA_HOME/bin :

   cd $JAVA_HOME; sudo ln -s Commands bin 

• reboot

• check if tomcat is working on http://localhost:8080 (ok)

• get and compile a unicorn:

   cd ~/workspace hg clone https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/unicorn cd unicorn ant retrieve compress-css compress-js war cli 

• install unicorn in tomcat:

   sudo cp dist/unicorn.war $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/ sudo cp WebContent/resources/tomcat_policy/* $CATALINA_HOME/conf/ 

• yes, it works, but only for public addresses; we need to change

  • one setting in unicorn.properties : ACCEPT_LOCAL_ADDRESSES = true
  • validation paths in observers.properties from http://validator.w3.org/.../*.wadl to file:///.../*.wadl

• I can change *.properties in $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/unicorn/WEB-INF/classes or (better) in ~/workspace/unicorn/WebContent/WEB_INF/conf . But the changes of the latter never fall into .war , I do not know why. (Maybe they are pacifist?) If *.properties.default renamed to *.properties , they are not in the distribution, if I do not rename them, the changes are ignored. I found a hint to include this conf path in $CLASSPATH , but that didn't help either.

• So, I copy the adapted configs to the installed webapp, and Unicorn seems to start, but the check is done on a white page (status code = 200, but content length = 0).

• In the tomcats error log I find only (I don't know if this is important):

   INFO: validateJarFile(/opt/local/share/java/tomcat6/webapps/unicorn/WEB-INF/lib/servlet-api-2.5.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class 

CLI

In between, I tried using the command line interface. java -jar unicorn.jar shows some usage hints, but checking for something fails with

 Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1 at org.w3c.unicorn.UnicornClient.main(UnicornClient.java:113) 

Finally

What can I do?