Deploy

Links

Context

To deploy an application outside of the webapps folder, extract the war file or copy the exploded application to a folder. In this example the folder is:

C:\deploy\myfaces-template\

Create new folders inside the conf folder of Tomcat. In this example the folder names are:

conf\Catalina\localhost\

The folder names are from two places:

The Engine name from conf/server.xml (I think).
The host name. In this example localhost.

Inside this folder create an XML file to hold the context (web application). In this example the file is called myfaces-template.xml. Here are the contents of a typical (Tomcat 6) file:

<Context
    cachingAllowed="true"
    cookies="true"
    privileged="false"
    docBase="c:/deploy/myfaces-template"
    reloadable="true"
    swallowOutput="false"
    useNaming="true">
    <Valve
        className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
        directory="c:/deploy/myfaces-template/logs"
        prefix="localhost_access_log."
        suffix=".txt"
        pattern="common"
    />
</Context>

For Tomcat 5 you will probably need to add the path attribute.

`cachingAllowed`	The cache for static resources will be used
`cookies`	If you want cookies to be used for session identifier communication
`path`	For Tomcat 6 (see Issues): The value of this field must not be set except when statically defining a Context in `server.xml`, as it will be infered from the filenames used for either the `.xml` context file or the `docBase`.
`privileged`	Set to true to allow this context to use container servlets, like the manager servlet.
`docBase`	The Document Base (also known as the Context Root) directory for this web application, or the pathname to the web application archive file (if this web application is being executed directly from the WAR file). You may specify an absolute pathname for this directory or WAR file, or a pathname that is relative to the appBase directory of the owning Host.
`reloadable`	Set to true if you want Catalina to monitor classes in `/WEB-INF/classes/` and `/WEB-INF/lib` for changes, and automatically reload the web application if a change is detected. This feature is very useful during application development, but it requires significant runtime overhead and is not recommended for use on deployed production applications.
`swallowOutput`	If the value of this flag is true, the bytes output to `System.out` and `System.err` by the web application will be redirected to the web application logger.
`useNaming`	Set to true to have Catalina enable a JNDI `InitialContext`.
`Valve`	A `Valve` element represents a component that will be inserted into the request processing pipeline for the associated Catalina container. http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/valve.html

See Issues for details of an error which occurs when the path attribute is missing.

Permissions

From:

http://www.springframework.org/docs/MVC-step-by-step/Spring-MVC-step-by-step-Part-1.html

If you are on a system where you are not the owner of the Tomcat install, then the Tomcat owner must either grant you full access to the webapps directory or the owner must create a new directory named ‘springapp’ in the ‘webapps’ directory of the Tomcat installation, and also give you full rights to deploy to this newly created directory.

On Linux I run the command:

chmod a+rwx springapp

to give everybody full rights to this directory.