[Tomcat] Dynamic Context?

[Gregg Bolinger]

Recently, I've changed the way I do development with Tomcat a bit. I used to write Ant deploy/undeploy/redeploy tasks and those worked great. What stunk was when I was stuck doing a bunch of JSP work and having to do a redeploy for every little CSS/Javascript change.

What I do now, is I create a context that points to my working project which is layed out just like a real deployed application. Works great with the context reloadable set to true. Problem is that when I start working on a different project, I have to go comment the context and create or uncomment the other one.

Is there anyway that I can tell tomcat to use a context on startup or something so I don't have to keep editing my server.xml? Utalizing the tomcat/conf/catalina/localhost/appname.xml context file doesn't help either. I have to go rename the context's that I want Tomcat to ignore and then rename the one I want Tomcat to load.

Thanks.

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm not quite following. What prevents you from having multiple contexts, each with their own context xml file, and all laid out in the way you describe?

[Ben Souther]

You shouldn't have to edit server.xml at all.
Starting with version 5, Tomcat supports context fragment files which are just the context tag stored in a file named after your application.
These files are stored in {tomcat-install}/conf/Catalina/localhost.

If you remove this file for a particular application, Tomcat will undeploy that app. Likewise, putting it back, will re-deploy it.
[ December 18, 2006: Message edited by: Ben Souther ]

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Ulf Dittmer:
I'm not quite following. What prevents you from having multiple contexts, each with their own context xml file, and all laid out in the way you describe?

Nothing, except I don't need to load 5 applications while I am working on one. You know, memory usage and all. ;)

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Ben Souther:
You shouldn't have to edit server.xml at all.
Starting with version 5, Tomcat supports context fragment files which are just the context tag stored in a file named after your application.
These files are stored in {tomcat-install}/conf/Catalina/localhost.

If you remove this file for a particular application, Tomcat will undeploy that app. Likewise, putting it back, will re-deploy it.

[ December 18, 2006: Message edited by: Ben Souther ]

Originally posted by Gregg Bolinger:
Utalizing the tomcat/conf/catalina/localhost/appname.xml context file doesn't help either. I have to go rename the context's that I want Tomcat to ignore and then rename the one I want Tomcat to load.

which I suppose I could create a script to do this and launch Tomcat, thus creating a dynamic context loader, in a sense. Just thought there might be something a bit more built in.

[Ben Souther]

Missed that, sorry
[ December 18, 2006: Message edited by: Ben Souther ]

[Gregg Bolinger]

I would still like to be able to load a context or specify a context at runtime with Tomcat. I know that has to be possible because when you use Intellij's IDEA webapp deployment features, I believe it does this with the exploded directory for your webapp.

So if anyone has any ideas...