Hi Chris,

First of all tnx for your response.

For my own purpose it was about the conf/[engine]/[host] folder and I'm now creating that in my dockerfile and thus I got rid of the error.

However, this question is not so much to solve it for just myself, but more to be able to give proper directions to anyone dockerizing Tomcat or providing 'generic' Tomcat base images.

I'm guessing whether or not to turn of createDirs really depends on how Tomcat is used to deploy webapps/war files and whether or not turning off createDirs will cause issues on startup/at runtime might depends on how hosts are defined (unpackWAR/autoDeploy/deployOnStartup settings), but the exact correlation is unclear to me and I cannot find any documentation on it.

You are deploying a WAR file, right?
yes, but I already unzip the WAR into the /webapps folder while dockerizing my entire application > If you don't set createDirs="true" then Tomcat will not be able to unpack WAR files for you.

Which folders does Tomcat depend on for the deployment of WAR files then? The standard Tomcat download comes with the following:

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
      <Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
            unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">

And already has the webapps folder in the distribution.

Am I correct in saying that createDirs="true" would make sure the /webapps and /conf/Catalina/localhost directories exist on startup? Or any other directory of you'd configure other engines/hosts?

And when does Tomcat utilize the conf/[engine]/[host] folder? As I mentioned before I resolved the error in the logs for my own purpose by just creating the missing directory while dockerizing my app, but afaics Tomcat never writes something to it, which makes me think that the folder is only used in certain circumstances.

Again: my goal is to get clear what Tomcat needs in different scenarios, thus things can be done correctly in generic Tomcat docker base images and/or provide proper instructions with those base images as to how (re)configure/adjust the base images based on the different usages.

Maybe it'd make sense to add such clarifications to the Tomcat docs as well (I'd be willing to create a PR)

TIA,

Paul


On 8/31/2020 5:24 PM, Christopher Schultz wrote:
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Paul,

On 8/31/20 05:36, Paul wrote:
Hello,

When running Tomcat in a Docker container as non-root, I'm getting
an error entry in the logs:

Unable to create directory for deployment:
[/usr/local/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost] I traced this down to
the aforementioned directory not being there when Tomcat gets
launched and the user running Tomcat does not having the
permissions to create the directory.

I also traced where this error message is coming from and its due
to the createDirs attribute on the host declaration in server.xml
not being set to false. The docs for the createDirs property states
that if its set to true (the default) it'll attempt to create some
directories, log an error when it fails, but the failure wont stop
the startup of Tomcat.

But what I cannot find anywhere is why those directories are
created in the first place and what the ramifications are of them
not being created when createDirs is set to false.
You are deploying a WAR file, right?

If you don't set createDirs="true" then Tomcat will not be able to
unpack WAR files for you.

This question is for Tomcat docker images in general (in order to
determine whether generic Tomcat Docker images should do something
different to prevent these Errors in the logs), in my specific
scenario however I'm running one webapp: an exploded WAR in the
webapps/ROOT directory, which comes with its on context.xml in
/webapps/ROOT/META-INF/context.xml
If webapps/ already exists, what directory is Tomcat trying to create?
conf/[engine]/[host]?

Can you arrange for conf/[engine]/[host] (usually
conf/Catalina/localhost) to exist so that the setting for createDirs
doesn't matter?

- -chris
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