Develop Reference

Allowing a user to access directory with nginx under spring security application

I have a application where running with tomcat 8, I am using spring security, so its impossible to access a file where not in my tomcat 8.
For example, my application with tomcat 8 can open with http://domain.com, then I have a directory where located at /root/image.
But my tomcat location in /root/tomcat8/webapp/ROOT.war.
I tried to use symbolic link and open the folder /root/image as allmyimage
but when I try to open that image with http://domain.com/allmyimage/nature.jpg, my application with spring security will handle this one and not allow me to access /root/image/nature.jpg.
Then I try to use nginx, but I don't know what to configure, and I don't know if nginx will resolve my problem.
Any suggestion?

Migrating an Enterprise app from JBoss to WebSphere

I am trying to migrate an enterprise application from JBoss to Websphere 8.5. The application is configured with Spring MVC and tiles. The application is hosted in the server root of the JBoss Server, i.e. to access the application we just type https://localhost/ in the browser.For this reason all the links and association in the applications are currently written as follows:
<link href="/resources/jQuery.js" .../>
...
Home
etc.
But in WebSphere the application needs to be in a context root viz. https://localhost:9443/MigratedApplication.
The problem is that all the links and resources mapped in the application now are inside https://localhost:9443/MigratedApplication/resources but they are still looked for in https://localhost:9443/resources resulting in errors on the application throughout.
Any ways to resolve the issue by configuration in WebSphere?

Unfortunately you have hardcoded paths in your application, so you have 2 choices:
change the context root of the application on WebSphere to / as in JBoss (probably easier one, as doesnt require changes in application)
change all links to relative ones (this should be done in the first place during application development to make it independent of context root)

Deploying two applications in GlassFish's root context

I have two applications that I need to deploy to GlassFish and I'd like to know how to put the two in the same GlassFish root context. I know that to put an application in the root context, I need to write the following line in glassfish-web.xml:
<context-root> / </ context-root>
So, when I acess http://localhost:8080 this address will open my application. But how to deploy both in the root context? Will I have to change the port?

How to dynamically enable war files deployed in Tomcat6+

I am new to the world of J2ee using Tomcat, so pardon me for my noobness.
At Tomcat start-up, all the war files deployed gets enabled. What do I need to do if I want some of them to be enabled at start up and start the rest of the wars later as per my convenience? There should be something which tells tomcat to enable the wars right[modifying which I might set the start-up settings of an application manual/automatic like that we do for windows services in services.msc]?
What I'm looking for is, if there are 3 different apps deployed in tomcat, I should be able to instruct tomcat that at Tomcat start-up, only app1 should start. I will manually turn up app2 and app3 as and when I need it. Like configuring the start up of apps with options like "manual"/"automatic"
Thanks in advance.

How to set context path in Tomcat so one could enter the site without appending the deployed folder name?

I read about this on Tomcat guide here and some SO questions. And I think I'm pretty much doing the same thing. But in some way cannot manage to succeed.
First of all I have to say that my application is deployed on a shared Tomcat server that I have no control over. I just drop my .war file and it gets deployed.
I tried to package my application as ROOT.war but didn't work. The admin told me to package it as whatever the name I want and they would take care of it.
I packaged it as my-application.war and it got deployed but I have to enter http://my-host/my-application to get to the website.
After contacting the admin they told me that they have put a context elemnt in my host in Tomcat config file like:
<Context path="" docBase="path of my-application deployed folder"/>
which was supposed to set my-application as default application for all the requests coming to my-host. But it didn't and whenever I enter http://my-host I get:
HTTP Status 404 - / The requested resource (/) is not available
But again when I enter http://my-host/my-application it all works fine. Any suggestion on what might be wrong is definitely appreciated.
Updates:
I tried to follow the steps described in tomcat documentation on how to make the application default. 3 ways are described and I tried all three ways and could successfully deploy my application as ROOT on localhost.
I also tried to reproduce the problem I'm facing on remote server so I could find the reason and report it to admin. I find couple of problems.
In server.xml fragment that admin sent me autoDeploy and deployOnStartUp are set to true, whereas they should be false if explicitly defining Context element in server.xml. This will cause double deployment which creates a ROOT folder and a folder with the name of the .war file. Deleting the .war will delete it's corresponding folder and undeploys the application but ROOT remains and must be deleted manually and requires a Tomcat restart. Until it's restarted any deployment of ROOT.war will fail.
I figured there are some reasons preventing ROOT.war from deploying. One could be that a ROOT.xml exists in conf/{engine-name}/{host-name} or a ROOT folder exists in appBase of the host or as I described above a ROOT application from previous deployment is not undeployed and requires Tomcat restart.
Either way I couldn't exactly pinpoint what exactly is preventing ROOT.war from deploying since that requires the access to Tomcat log files and conf files to check the cases I described above.
Also from all I see my the admin seems incapable of maintaining a Tomcat server and finding the problem. So I decided to go with a dedicated Tomcat server after struggling with the shared one.

In your question, you state that the admin set the context as:
<Context path="" docBase="path of my-application deployed folder"/>
Based on the comments above, I would suggest trying to use the relative path of your application rather than the absolute path.
I tried this on my tomcat server with:
<Context path="/" docBase="my-application/" />
and that did the trick.
The Host element which contains the Context element does actually set some parameters that might also impact the context. If it's the default settings, then a relative context should simply point to the webapps folder. If it's been changed, the results may vary.

Usually this can be achieved by the following steps:
Define a ROOT.xml context file in conf/Catalina/localhost
Name your webapp WAR “ROOT.war” or containing folder “ROOT”
However, i doubt you will be able to do that on a shared Tomcat instance. Only one application can run as the default application. The hosting company will probably not allow it as otherwise which application will they allow to be the default out of the many people sharing the same Tomcat instance?
See this link : http://staraphd.blogspot.com/2009/10/change-default-root-folder-in-tomcat.html

The Tomcat Wiki has a section on putting applications into default context.
However, in order to do this it implies some control over the Tomcat server that may not be possible in the shared context you describe.
If you have the ability to install other systems on the server, one alternate solution would be to use a proxy server like NGINX. This is way more complicated than simply naming your war file ROOT.war, but sometimes it's the only option.
If you have NGINX listening on the server and you have your own url, you use the HttpProxyModule with setting such as:
server {
listen 80;
server_name my.domain.com;
location / {
proxy_pass http://my-host/my-application;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}
}
Also in order to make this work, you'd have to own the "my.domain.com" url and it would need to be separate from the one everyone is using for the shared Tomcat server.
The nginx portion of the solution is free, but if you need to register a new url and then use something like no-ip.com to redirect it to the tomcat server it would cost money.