Hi all, I'm having some trouble with tomcat and symbolic links. I am working with OSX and I use a local instance of Tomcat to do some testing before deploying my site elsewhere.
What I want to do: I'd like to create a small script which will stop tomcat, clear out old deployment folders, rebuild my project, copy the resulting WAR file to the webapps folder, restart tomcat, wait for deployment to finish, and finally replace a JSP file with a symbolic link to the corresponding file that is in my workspace. Why I want to do this: I'd like to be able to quickly rebuild and redeploy my WAR and also edit my JSP files and see those changes by simply refreshing the already-open page. My problem: I have all of the above steps working so far. However, as soon as I swap out the real index.JSP with a link to the one in my workspace, I can no longer load the page, I get a 404 error instead. What I have tried: I have found questions like mine asked many times and usually the solution is to hunt down a "context.xml" file and add a tag into that file, 'allowLinking="true"'. I have tried to add this tag into "<tomcat home>/libexec/conf/context.xml", "<tomcat home>/libexec/conf/Catalina/localhost/context.xml" (created this one) and also "<tomcat home>/libexec/webapps/appname/META-INF/context.xml". After multiple restarts, none of those seem to change any functionality that I can see. By trial and error, I have eventually found that if I follow these steps, I can get the link to work for a little while... Deploy the WAR Load the page (It works) Move index_bs.jsp to index_bs.jsp.bak (in the webapp directory) Load the page (404, as expected) Create a symbolic link from index_bs.jsp to index_bs.jsp.bak Load the page (It works!) Edit index_bs.jsp.bak, save Load the page (404 again) This seems very strange to me. Obviously I've reached a point where symbolic linking works somewhat, but as soon as I edit the original file (my main goal here) the link stops working as expected. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here? I must be missing something... Some information about my setup: OSX 10.10.5 Tomcat 8.0.28 installed with my username running brew brew to "/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/8.0.28/" "/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/8.0.28/libexec/webapps/hue-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war" deployed successfully to "/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/8.0.28/libexec/webapps/hue-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT/" Target file is "/Users/uid/mygithub/hue-stuff/hue-web/src/main/webapp/index_bs.jsp"
