Tomcat War

[Nadine McKenzie]

I am trying to deploy a war file to my TOMCAT_HOME/webapps dir. I have several web applications listed under webapps so I am relying on several <Context...> element entries in the server.xml file.
<Context path="/realationships" docBase="realationships" debug="0"
crossContext="true">
(Based on an earlier post I have removed the reloadable="true" attribute.)
Also, the directory TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/realationships has been deleted since I read in the Tomcat Bible that when realationships.war is present the realationships directory must be removed. The Tomcat Bible does not make any mention of having to remove the <Context...> element (based on my cursory review).
When bringing up the web browser I get a
Apache Tomcat/4.0.2 - HTTP Status 404 - /realationships
The requested resource (/realationships) is not available.
My knowledge of Tomcat is very rudimentory. Please advise.

[William Brogden]

There are attributes in the conf/server.xml file that control automatic unpacking of WARs. Here is what I found as the default in Tomcat 4.24 - I don't remember what the default is in earlier Tomcats.

    <Host name="localhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps" 
       unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
 

You do need to restart the server for this to work. Alternately you can use the management application to deploy WARs without stopping Tomcat.
Bill

[Nadine McKenzie]

After much finagling and re-visiting of some of the earlier threads, it finally sank in. Although this information exists in the threads, I'm condensing it here in case someone else runs into the same situation.
Here're are the steps I took to get it to work. Let's assume the name of your web app is mywebapp1.
(1) if there is a context entry in $TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml that looks like this...
<Context path="/mywebapp1" docBase="mywebapp1" debug="0" reloadable="true" crossContext="true"> ...
Remove the entire entry!
(2) once you have your webapp1.war file created, place it in $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps
(3) remove the directory called $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/webapps1
(this step may not be necessary but I'm including it here since I read this in a book)