Develop Reference

How to set up Tomcat to use the config file in conf/Catalina/localhost?

so my question is how can I set up a Tomcat Server to use this configuration file conf/Catalina/localhost/MyApp.xml?
It works like a charm if my application is named like this: MyApp.war so tomcat will extract the archive to MyApp.
But I want to use a name with the version inside like MyApp##1.0-SNAPSHOT.war.
Is it possible to configure the tomcat so it will use the MyApp.xml anyway?

You can set path and docBase attributes of Context element as described in the docs.
Create a directory outside $CATALINA_HOME/webapps and place war files there, let's say /opt/tomcat/wars/. Then set docBaseattribute to the full path to your war. Make user tomcat user has read permissions on that directory. If war is inside webapps directory you could end up with a double deployment depending on deployOnStartup and autoDeploy attributes of Host element.
<Context path="/MyApp" docBase="/opt/tomcat/wars/MyApp##1.0-SNAPSHOT.war">
...
</Context>
You can try also naming the xml the same as the war file.

Where is Spring MVC context path set?

I am not sure how context path is set.
When I rename my .war file in tomcat on autodeploy, the web page goes to localhost:8080/newDirectory as expected, however for some reason wherever there's a call to pageContext.request.contextPath in a Spring based page, it still returns the old context path.
I tried to override the context path by setting:
<context path="/newDirectory" docBase="appName" override="true"></context>
in server.xml but it doesn't work.
My question is, where does Spring read its context path from? I used Maven and I did see there's a
<appContext>/${project.artifactId}</appContext>
in the pom.xml, does this mean I need to rename the artifactId to newDirectory ?
I have also tried adding that <context path="/newDirectory"...> in /META-INF/context.xml (which now I know will be ignored anyway due to my server.xml changes).
Thanks in advance for your answer.

It not depends on Spring maybe you are using a maven plugin to build your war that reads the appContext property. You can read about definig ServletContext in this thread.

Every PageRequest will get current HttpServletRequest object and get context path of current request and append your .jsp (that will work even if the context-path this resource is accessed at changes).
Eg,
if you have war file as MyCompany.war and having a page with ${pageContext.request.contextPath}/MyJspPage.jsp.
Then your context path is http://abc/MyCompany and it works as http://abc/MyCompany/MyJspPage.jsp.
Suppose if you change your war file as OurCompany.war,
then your context path changes to http://abc/OurCompany and Jsp will work as http://abc/OurCompany/MyJspPage.jsp.
It means context path will change automatically to name of the application(War file name) with out any changes.
In your case,after renaming war file name with newDirectory,your webserver will deploy newDirectory application but still newDirectory application exist in the web server.I think you should delete old application from webapp and then check by reloading your newDirectory application.

Java configure context root of web application

I have a Java web application using Wicket 6, Spring 3.2 and WildFly 8.2.0. Right now i'm setting the context root of my web application in the jboss-web.xml file like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE jboss-web PUBLIC "-//JBoss//DTD Web Application 5.0//EN" "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-web_5_0.dtd">
<jboss-web>
<context-root>/myCustomContextRoot</context-root>
</jboss-web>
The jboss-web.xml file is compiled into the war. Now some clients want to change this context root to an empty context root. So i hace to recompile a version of my app per different context root. Is there a way to set the context root of my application from outside .war, programatically from a .properties file, or any other way for example in standalone.xml of WildFly 8.2.0?

Set the runtime name when deploying your web application. Suppose your WAR is called myapp-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.war. Using a runtime name of foo.war, the context root will be /foo.
Using a runtime name of ROOT.war, the context root will be /.
The runtime name can be set when deploying via the Web Console or via the CLI.

Thanks for your Answer Harald Wellmann. It answers the question and pointed me into the right direction!
Some things I had to find out on my own and which may help others:
the exact syntax in jboss-cli to specify a runtime-name is:
deploy path_to_war_file --runtime-name=wantedName.war
This leads to a context-root of /wantedName/ for the webapp.
The runtime-name does not have any effect on the context-root, if the war file contains a jboss-web.xml in WEB-INF which in turn contains a context-root tag.
That is, if you want to control the context-root of your web-app in WildFly at deployment time, you must not specify any context-root in jboss-web.xml.
It is ok to have a jboss-web.xml without a context-root tag if you want to take advantage of the runtime-name to control the context-root.
I tested this on WildFly 9.0.1 and 9.0.2:
Hope this helps!

tomcat war deployment

I'm deploying a war file in tomcat name being "myapps.war". I've made an entry in server.xml for docbase to be "/callmyapp". But after deployment two folders are getting created in the tomcat webapps directory -
myapps
callmyapp
and now I can access my war using two urls one starting with /myapps and another /callmyapp.
I want only /callmyapp as context root to this war and do not want to respond to requests /myapps. Any help?
Thanks,
Charu

rename myapps.war to callmyapp.war. tomcat automatically unpacks the war into the directory of same name. Setting a different context then also creates a second directory.
Or you can define a context.xml and put it in your /webapps directory :
<Context path="/callmyapp" docBase="webapps/myapps.war" />

Have you tried the rename the app.war ? I think the root is inferred from the filename.

customize web application root context in apache

I have web application abc.war and I want to deploy it on Apache Tomcat.
The problem is that, by default, the path to this application is http://<server-name>/abc
but I want to access it as http://<server-name>/xyz.
I put into WAR's META-INF folder the file context.xml that is :
<Context path="/xyz" docBase="abc" override="true" />
The application WAR abc.war is located under %CATALINA_HOME%\webapps and it is extracted to %CATALINA_HOME%\webapps\abc folder.
Also, while deployment, the file context.xml from abc/META-INF is copied to %CATALINA_HOME%\conf\Catalina\localhost as abc.xml
It seems that this should work, but I still can't access my application through http://<server-name>/xyz, but only through http://<server-name>/abc
In addition, I still see in apache log the following line while deployment of abc.war :
context path = /abc
Could anybody, please, help while this doesn't work, or tell if there is any way of deploying of web application on apache such that application could be accessed by customized path (that does not relate to war-file name) ?
Thanks in advance.

Take a look at the docs:
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.