Tomcat – How to specify path in META-INF/context.xml for Tomcat

tomcattomcat7

I'm using Tomcat 7 and would like to set the context root of a war file in the war file itself and have Tomcat autodeploy and pick up this path.
I thought I found the way to do it by putting a context.xml in the META-INF directory of the war which contains.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context path="/somepath/myapp"/>

But this doesn't seem to work, I think it's loaded by http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/api/org/apache/catalina/startup/SetContextPropertiesRule.html which states it loads everything but the path!

I know I can name the war somepath#myapp.war and it will pick it up but I also deploy to weblogic which isn't happy with a name like this.

Is there some setting I can use to have the path work from the context.xml above?

Thanks
David

Best Answer

The Context path attribute is ignored unless the path is specified in a hard-coded Context in server.xml, which is strongly discouraged, and doesn't take multilevel paths.

The name of the war file, or the name of the Context xml file in tomcat/conf/Catalina/hostname becomes the path of the deployed application.

In your case the latter of the two above is the solution, just make sure you put the .war file outside of the designated appBase for the Host, or you'll deploy the app twice.

In: conf/Catalina/localhost/myapp#path.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Context docBase="/some/path/to/myapp.war">
</Context>

Related Solutions

Tomcat – Why does tomcat replace context.xml on redeploy

Undeploy part of redeploy deletes app and the associated context.xml.

If you use maven tomcat plugin you can avoid deleting context.xml if you deploy your app with command like this:

mvn tomcat:deploy-only -Dmaven.tomcat.update=true

More info here: https://tomcat.apache.org/maven-plugin-2.0-beta-1/tomcat7-maven-plugin/deploy-only-mojo.html

You can use deploy-only with parameter mode to deploy the context.xml too.

Tomcat – How to set the context path of a web application in Tomcat 7.0

What you can do is the following;

Add a file called ROOT.xml in <catalina_home>/conf/Catalina/localhost/

This ROOT.xml will override the default settings for the root context of the tomcat installation for that engine and host (Catalina and localhost).

Enter the following to the ROOT.xml file;

<Context 
  docBase="<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

Here, <yourApp> is the name of, well, your app.. :)

And there you go, your application is now the default application and will show up on http://localhost:8080

However, there is one side effect; your application will be loaded twice. Once for localhost:8080 and once for localhost:8080/yourApp. To fix this you can put your application OUTSIDE <catalina_home>/webapps and use a relative or absolute path in the ROOT.xml's docBase tag. Something like this;

<Context 
  docBase="/opt/mywebapps/<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

And then it should be all OK!

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Tomcat – Why does tomcat replace context.xml on redeploy

Tomcat – How to set the context path of a web application in Tomcat 7.0

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