Java – Tomcat mapping context via server.xml

jakarta-eejavatomcatweb-applications

I created a war and deployed it to my $CATALINA_HOME/webapps folder just fine. Then I wanted to test configuring it to point to a war at an arbitrary location such as c:\tmp\mywar.war. Here is what I put in the server.xml file within $CATALINA_HOME/conf.

<Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
<Context path="/blah" docBase="h:/tmp/mywar.war" reloadable="true" />
</Host>

Tomcat returns 404 when I try to load localhost:8080/blah. If I point docBase to the exploded war instead, it works just fine. What am I missing here?

Best Answer

You'd better put the context configuration in an individual file at /META-INF/context.xml inside the application files.

It is NOT recommended to place elements directly in the server.xml file. This is because it makes modifying the Context configuration more invasive since the main conf/server.xml file cannot be reloaded without restarting Tomcat.

You can check out more details in Tomcat7 document here: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html#Defining_a_context

Related Topic