Tomcat – How to define context path of application in Tomcat 6

tomcattomcat6

Application is deployed on Tomcat6 on context path "/environame/appname".

<Context
...
        path="/environame/appname"
...
</Context>

But I cannot access my application using following URL:

http://localhost:8080/environame/appname

I have to use underscore instead of slash between "environame" and "appname".

http://localhost:8080/environame_appname

Tomcat 5 works differently.
In case of Tomcat 5 there will not be underscore in the URL:

http://localhost:8080/environame/appname

What should I change in configuration of my application or Tomcat 6 to access my application using slash instead of underscore between "environame" and "appname"?

UPDATE:

path The context path of this web application, which is matched against the beginning of each request URI to select the appropriate
web application for processing. All of the context paths within a
particular Host must be unique. If you specify a context path of an
empty string (""), you are defining the default web application for
this Host, which will process all requests not assigned to other
Contexts.

The value of this field must not be set except when statically
defining a Context in server.xml, as it will be inferred from the
filenames used for either the .xml context file or the docBase.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/context.html

We store context xml file to $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/environame_appname.xml file.
Tomcat 5.0.28 uses path attribute of Context element.
Tomcat 6 uses name of context xml file.
Is it possible to change configuration to use path attribute instead of the name of the xontext xml file?

ANSWER:
There is a bug bug#46713

If a path attribute is set inside the context tag in context xml's it
is ignored. Instead the path is set to "/" + . While it nice that even pathes with '/' can
be encoded in the file name by replacing '/' with '#' it is very
confusing that an existing path attribute is simply ignored.

So, I need just rename my context xml file to environame#appname.xml.

Best Answer

A long time ago (tomcat 4 I think) it was possible to deploy a war archive with the name environame_appname.war and tomcat made it available via the url environame/appname/... I'm not sure if this still works (and have no time yet to test it). Tomcat does some replacement with slashes and underscores.

Another way to achieve your goal would be using apache and mod_proxy, mod_proxy_ajp (or mod_proxy_html) and mod_rewrite. Then you can define two applications in tomcat (app01 and app02), define a proxy rule that forwards request to /app01 (resp /app02) to your tomcat and a rewrite rule that rewrites requests to /env01/app to /app01 and /env02/app02 to /app02.

Related Solutions

Java – Define Servlet Context in WAR-File

There are two important points in the the documentation of the Context Container:

In individual files (with a ".xml" extension) in the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/ directory. The name of the file (less the .xml extension) will be used as the context path. Multi-level context paths may be defined using #, e.g. foo#bar.xml for a context path of /foo/bar. The default web application may be defined by using a file called ROOT.xml.

Only if a context file does not exist for the application in the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/, in an individual file at /META-INF/context.xml inside the application files. If the web application is packaged as a WAR then /META-INF/context.xml will be copied to $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/ and renamed to match the application's context path. Once this file exists, it will not be replaced if a new WAR with a newer /META-INF/context.xml is placed in the host's appBase.

So, when you bundle a META-INF/context.xml, the file gets renamed to the name of the WAR and this name becomes the context path, regardless of any path defined in the Context element.

I see thus two options here:

Either set the name of the generated war to a shorter name (I suggest using <finalName> over <warName> which is deprecated AFAIK):
```
<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <finalName>mycontext</finalName>
    ...
  </build>
  ...
</project>
```

Or use the maven-tomcat-plugin for the deployment and set the context path in the plugin configuration:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    ...
    <plugins>
      ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
        <configuration>
          <path>/mycontext</path>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
    ...
  </build>
  ...
</project>

Java – Tomcat mapping context via server.xml

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

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Java – Define Servlet Context in WAR-File

Java – Tomcat mapping context via server.xml

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