Joe Hansen wrote:
Many Thanks for the link Chuck! Here's what I did.
1. Created a directory named c:\Tomcat\abc\ROOT.
2. Moved the previous contents of c:\Tomcat\webapps\abc to
c:\Tomcat\abc\ROOT directory.
...
Let me throw in my grain of salt.
I like things organised in a logical way, with a structure that
immediately makes it clear to anyone what one is trying to achieve. And
I like to have things that are logically at the same level, to also look
that way at the physical level if possible.
Your mileage may vary as they say, but I would do as follows :
The basic Tomcat, which as downloaded and installed from the one and
only original and genuine site, is structured as follows :
C:/tomcat : top installation dir (*)
|
--- bin : the programs
--- conf : the configuration files
--- lib : common things
--- webapps : standard and example applications
+ maybe your applications
|
--- ROOT : the standard default application
--- etc..
Nice, clear, clean, matches the documentation etc..
In your server.xml, there is a single <Host> defined, it answers to the
name "localhost", and it is also the default host, which means that if
some DNS hostname evaluates to the IP address of your host computer,
then any request addressed to that DNS hostname will be processed
according to the setup of that <Host>.
To indicate that the web applications for that host live under
c:/tomcat/webapps, there is the "appBase" attribute of the <Host> tag :
<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps">
"webapps" being relative and thus interpreted as a subdirectory of the
tomcat running directory, or CATALINA_BASE, which itself by default is
the same as CATALINA_HOME, which is the tomcat installation directory
c:/tomcat.
Now you add two web applications "abc" and "xyz".
The normal place would be to install these under c:/tomcat/webapps/abc
and c:/tomcat/webapps/xyz.
But then, you would have to access them via URLs like
http://hostname:port/abc
http://hostname:port/xyz
Instead, you would like to access them as respectively
http://abc.local/
http://xyz.local
That requires 2 parts :
1) you have to make abc.local and xyz.local into DNS aliases evaluating
to the same IP address as your physical host.
That, you did already, in part.
2) you have to make each of these applications be the "default
application", so that you can call them without the prefix (abc or xyz).
That is a problem, because
- there is already a ROOT application (the default Tomcat one)
- abc and xyz cannot be both renamed to ROOT
So you decide to solve this by using virtual hosts.
Very good, that is one of the ways.
So we add 2 virtual host declarations to the Tomcat server.xml, for a
total of 3 :
<Host name"localhost" appBase="webapps">
...
<Host name"abc.local" appBase="webapps-abc">
...
<Host name=xyz.local" appBase="webapps-xyz">
and we change our basic directory layout to be :
C:/tomcat : top installation dir
|
--- bin : the programs
--- conf : the configuration files
--- lib : common things
--- webapps : standard and example applications
+ maybe some of your applications
|
--- ROOT : the standard default application
--- webapps-abc : the applications of the "abc.local" host
|
|-- ROOT : the default application of the abc.local host
--- webapps-xyz : the applications of the "xyz.local" host
|
|-- ROOT : the default application of the xyz.local host
--- etc..
This way, you get to keep the standard and example applications of the
original Tomcat, to test and play around with. These will be called
whenever there is a request to
http://localhost/
http://127.0.0.1/
http://anything/
as long as "anything" evaluates to one of the IP addresses of your
physical host, and there is no specific <Host name="anything"> defined.
And whenever someone uses one of the names defined in a <Host> tag, they
will be directed to the corresponding appBase applications.
Also, the appBase's do not overlap, and they are at the same level in
the file hierarchy, which is easy to understand, conveys well the idea
that they are two choices at the same level, simplifies permission
settings, is easy for backups etc..
There are other techniques and layouts possible to achieve the same
effect, but I would not in any case base one application under
tomcat_dir/abc
and another one under
tomcat_dir/webapps/xyz
because I would find that confusing, and because I would not want the
future Tomcat developers of version 9.3 to suddenly find that "abc" or
"xyz" would be a cute name for a future indispensable Tomcat
subdirectory to store whatever.
I would also not want my boss to get the idea that the real nice name
for application "abc" should really be "server", and make things really
messy.
(*) In fact, it isn't. It normally wants to install itself in some
awfully chosen directory with plenty of spaces in the name, guaranteed
to give you stomac acidity some day, so don't let it do that.
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