I’m kicking out a couple freelance projects using Struts and Hibernate in the next couple weeks, this weekend I was fiddling with the Ant build script and I remembered Tomcat Manager App, which allows you to reload contexts while Tomcat is running (as well as start, stop, install etc..). Unfortunately, the /manager application only sees applications within the virtual host it’s running in and because I’m working with a couple different applications, I have multiple virtual hosts and I need to be able to utilize the /manager application from each one.
Turns out it’s not all that hard to get the /manager application working within a different virtual host… as long as you read the documentation very thoroughly. It’s as simple as adding this:
<Context path="/manager" debug="5" docBase="${CATALINA_BASE}\server\webapps\manager" privileged="true" />
(where ${CATALINA_BASE} is the absolute path to your tomcat install) to the virtual host element you have setup in server.xml (for those not experienced with Tomcat, adding a ‘context’ is similar to adding a virtual directory in IIS, make any more sense?). The one gotcha (in bold) is the privileged attribute. It *must* be set to true to run the /manager or /admin applications in virtual host besides localhost.
Reloading the application using Ant is a breeze, the Tomcat documenation includes an example build file, in short all you need is this:
<property name="path" value="/myapp"/>
<property name="url" value="http://localhost:8080/manager"/>
<property name="username" value="myusername"/>
<property name="password" value="mypassword"/>
<taskdef name="reload" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.ReloadTask"/>
<target name="reload" >
<reload
url="${url}"
username="${username}" password="${password}"
path="${path}"/>
</target>
Make sure that you have the catalina-ant.jar file coped from {Tomcat_install}\server\lib\ to your {Ant_install}\lib. If you are using Eclipse, go to Windows –> Preferences –> Ant –> –> Runtime –> Classpath and add catalina-ant.jar to the Runtime classpath.