I was working on a project where I had a central load-sharing server with multiple nodes to serve data from. I wanted the project to auto-scale, i.e. bring up new instances by starting jars which connect to the load-sharing server and let the server start sending requests to it.
The problem was that I wanted to start multiple serving nodes on one machine, and they would have a port conflict. The way to make this work was to let the node start on a random port, and let Jetty decide the port for us. But getting which port Jetty decided to give us is not straightforward. The simplest most straight-forward way to get the port that I found was this:
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( (ServerConnector) server.getConnectors()[0] ).getLocalPort();
This identifies the first connector running on the server, and casts it to a ServerConnector which provides the method getLocalPort() which is the port the server is listening on.
I love using embedded Jetty to build fat jars which serve the whole module in a neat dependency-free jar file that I can copy and run anywhere, and this lets me toss jars onto several servers and just start them there and have my system just work!