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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?

static-fading
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4 Answers4

5

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

Jacky
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5

If you want to have a site available at http://myhost:8080/myTestContext, put the following in $Catalina_home$/conf/localhost/whateveryoulike.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
    <Context deployOnStartup="true" docBase="C:\path\to\your\docBase\" path="/myTestContext" reloadable="false">
    <Manager pathname=""/>
</Context>
JoSSte
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0

I just ran into this problem. Slightly embarrassingly it was because I got a path wrong!

You can verify this by checking the logs (standard error ones) under

[Tomcat install directory]/logs

You'll see something that looks like this:

Jun 16, 2014 12:34:10 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext resourcesStart SEVERE: Error starting static Resources java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Document base ... does not exist or is not a readable directory

A further note (you won't get an error message for this) is that if you are deploying a war rather than an exploded webapp you have to specify the file's path and not just it's containing directory.

JonnyRaa
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0

Don't do that, this approach is discouraged from Tomcat 6:

For Tomcat 6, unlike Tomcat 4.x, 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.

Michael-O
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  • If you put the context settings in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/localhost/blah.xml, it deletes the configuration on each app redeploy. Unless there is a way to disable this behavior, whatever benefits you gain by keeping configuration out of server.xml are outweighed by the need to replace the xml configs manually each time. – static-fading Feb 27 '12 at 20:53
  • This is intended behavior and is correct. Since the file is associated with a context it **has** to be deleted with a redeploy. – Michael-O Feb 27 '12 at 21:26