How to purge tomcat's cache when deploying a new .war file? Is there a config setting?

Question

I have a simple hello, world servlet application that I am just playing around with, and pushing it out to my tomcat server on a VPS.

When I make a change to my code, and deploy it, tomcat doesn't serve the newly published code (even after starting the service again).

I stop the service, then push the new war file to /webapps/, and I make sure to delete the old exploded folder also.

When I re-start the server, it still serves the older codebase.

Is there a setting in the config to stop this behaviour?

Also, what folders would I have to delete? Please be specific (folders and paths) as I have tried deleting some and havent' gotten anywhere.

is tomcat pointing to the same directory to where you are publishing the war file? If you have deleted the exploded version (i assume work directory) and restarted the server, I can't think of how tomcat would get access to the old code. Please review your server.xml closely. — aishwarya, Nov 02 '11 at 01:51

score 26 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 02 '11 at 01:44

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You can delete the "work" directory.

Are you sure it's not a browser caching issue?

answered Nov 02 '11 at 01:44

Dave Newton

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yeah I'm sure, I even deleted the work/catalini/localhost folder (or some folder like that), it has happend a few times to its not by chance :) – Blankman Nov 02 '11 at 02:23
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Deleting stuff in the tomcat directories won't necessarily affect the browser cache. – Dave Newton Nov 02 '11 at 02:28
well the new version was writing logs to a file, and I did try firefox (was using chome first) – Blankman Nov 02 '11 at 03:52
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its not a browser caching issue. all web servers at some point in time get corrupt cache files stored on disk. and need to be purged. – hamish Feb 20 '18 at 22:25
@hamish "Corrupt cache files"? FWIW, and this is merely anecdotal, I've never had to manually delete a server's cached files. – Dave Newton Feb 20 '18 at 22:32
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don't delete the `work` directory. Just delete its contents. A `work` directory must exist (at least empty) for Tomcat to start up. – Abdull Oct 15 '18 at 13:49
@Abdull Maybe that's the case now, but it wasn't seven years ago. – Dave Newton Oct 15 '18 at 14:26
The work directory gets created again when you delete it.No issue there – Ojonugwa Jude Ochalifu Jan 23 '20 at 15:33

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 10 '17 at 10:18

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I'd add that in case of really odd behavior - where you spend a couple of hours saying WTF - try manually deleting the /webapps/yourwebapp/WEB-INF/classes directory. A java source file that was moved to another package will not have its compiled class file deleted - at least in the case of an exploded web-application on TC. This can seriously drive you crazy with unpredictable behavior, especially with an annotated servlet.

edited Nov 10 '17 at 10:18

palacsint

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answered Dec 23 '13 at 18:21

Hal50000

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This isn't intuitive... I'd have to copy exactly what was deployed back into that directory cuz the app can't function without those classes. So the net result is nothing will have changed. That class directory is recreated after every maven clean package. – Skystrider Aug 29 '22 at 20:38

svarog · Answer 3 · 2017-05-05T20:39:54.417

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A little late for the party, here's how I do it

Undeploy application from manager
Shutdown tomcat using ./shutdown.sh
Delete browser cache
Delete the application from webapps, and from /work/Catalina/...
Startup tomcat using ./startup.sh
Copy the new version of the application into /webapps and start it.

edited May 05 '17 at 20:39

answered Mar 26 '15 at 07:30

svarog

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score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 14 '16 at 11:31

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I encountered some weird behaviour that did not reflect the actual code base so after some time trying several solutions, my problem was solved by manually deleting everything under /var/cache/tomcat8/

answered Jun 14 '16 at 11:31

pkaramol

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In my case classloader was finding a non-existent class which, later, it was failing to load. The problem was a stale .class file stored in /var/cache/tomcat6/... – Stanislav Karakhanov Sep 12 '17 at 13:21

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 02 '17 at 14:54

I'm new to tomcat, and this problem was driving me nuts today. It was sporadic. I asked a colleague to help, and the WAR expanded and it did was it was supposed to. 3 deploys later that day, it reverted back to the original version.

In my case, the MySite.WAR got expanded to both ROOT AND MySite. MySite was usually served up. But sometimes tomcat decided it liked the ROOT one better and all my changes disappeared.

The "solution" is to delete the ROOT website with every deploy of the war.

score 1 · Answer 6 · edited Mar 24 '13 at 04:53

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Tomcat also creates a ROOT directory at the same level as work/. ROOT/ also caches the old stuff. delete ROOT along with Catalina directory in work.

edited Mar 24 '13 at 04:53

Tuxdude

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answered Mar 24 '13 at 04:31

Amit

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score 1 · Answer 7 · answered May 14 '16 at 14:20

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I have a bad time putting my war file at /etc/tomcat7/webapps but the real path was /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps. May you want to use sudo find / -type f -name "my-war-file.war" to know where is it.

And remove this folders /tmp/hsperfdata_* and /tmp/tomcat7-tomcat7-tmp.

answered May 14 '16 at 14:20

Ratata Tata

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I think in addition to others, the /tmp/hsperfdata_* may have been the one that worked for me in the end – Sajith Dilshan Jamal Jun 04 '23 at 03:15

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 23 '12 at 10:37

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Seems a timestamp issue. According to tomcat documentation, if there is a new jsp or servlet this will create a new _java file in the work folder unless the _java.class files are newer than the jsp or servlets.

answered Feb 23 '12 at 10:37

Apocalypse Araneta

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score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Nov 27 '16 at 03:17

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I had the same issue twice, but in the second time I realized it wasn't a problem on Tomcat at all.. Try to delete the cache of your browser, refresh the page and see if the new version of the page on your server is being shown up. It worked with me.

answered Nov 27 '16 at 03:17

Magno Nascimento

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score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Oct 17 '21 at 18:33

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In folder "/webapp" delete *.war files and folders corresponding to these folders(the same name).
Clear folder "/webapps/ROOT" tomcat.

answered Oct 17 '21 at 18:33

mailtime

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score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Nov 02 '11 at 01:43

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Sounds like your class loader is not loading the servlet classes once they are updated. This might be fixed if you change your web.xml file which should prompt the server/container to re-deploy and reload the servlet classes. I guess add an empty line at the end of your web.xml and save it and then see if that fixes it. As i said this might fix it or might not.

Good luck!

answered Nov 02 '11 at 01:43

Mechkov

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Shouldn't persist over a restart after complete removal of the older version, though. – Dave Newton Nov 02 '11 at 01:45
Hmm, yeah. It normally shouldn't but worth a try. – Mechkov Nov 02 '11 at 01:49

How to purge tomcat's cache when deploying a new .war file? Is there a config setting?

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