Tomcat – “Directory Listing” or serving static pages

tomcat

I am new to Tomcat and web development so please forgive me.

I am on a Linux box with Tomcat 6 running. I need a directory on the box exposed and browsable via a web browser.

I can get it to work by creating an xml file (path and docBase) in the Catalina/localhost/ directory and enabling "directory listing" in the Tomcat's web.xml file. But from what I heard, that is inefficient.

How do I just expose a single directory for my specific needs without affecting other deployed apps?

Thanks

Best Answer

You "just expose a single directory for my specific needs without affecting other deployed apps" "by creating an xml file (path and docBase) in the Catalina/localhost/ directory and enabling "directory listing" in the Tomcat's web.xml file."

What does "inefficient" mean? Compared to what? Under what conditions? What is your expected load?

Related Solutions

Tomcat – How to update a Tomcat webapp without restarting the entire service

Have you tried to use Tomcat's Manager application? It allows you to undeploy / deploy war files with out shutting Tomcat down.

If you don't want to use the Manager application, you can also delete the war file from the webapps directory, Tomcat will undeploy the application after a short period of time. You can then copy a war file back into the directory, and Tomcat will deploy the war file.

If you are running Tomcat on Windows, you may need to configure your Context to not lock various files.

If you absolutely can't have any downtime, you may want to look at Tomcat 7's Parallel deployments You may deploy multiple versions of a web application with the same context path at the same time. The rules used to match requests to a context version are as follows:

If no session information is present in the request, use the latest version.
If session information is present in the request, check the session manager of each version for a matching session and if one is found, use that version.
If session information is present in the request but no matching session can be found, use the latest version.

Java – Using environment variables in Tomcat/Catalina Context docBase configuration

Here's what I did in Tomcat7 (I think you'll have no problem doing it in other versions of Tomcat):

in setenv.bat I added the following line:

set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -DAPP_PATH="c:\path\to\app"

in my webapp.xml (located in C:\path-to-apache-tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost)

I did the following:

<Context docBase="${APP_PATH}\src\main\webapp">

Hope this helps!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tomcat – How to update a Tomcat webapp without restarting the entire service

Java – Using environment variables in Tomcat/Catalina Context docBase configuration

Related Topic