Setting appbase and docbase

Setting appbase and docbase - Tomcat

Tagged in : Tomcat

In virtual hosting(Cpanel/WHM) environment, sometimes classes or servlets inside WEB-INF/classes may not load into your JSP program. This is because, the path assigned to appbase and docbase might be same. For this purpose you can create a separate directory for Application Base.

First lets us know what is appbase? and what is docbase?

In virtual hosting , for every host there must be corresponding <Host> element in server.xml. The <Host> element contains appbase attribute.

appbase - specifies the Application Base directory for the virtual host. This is the pathname of a directory that contains web applications to be deployed.

The <Host> element contains <Context> element. The <Context> element specifies a web application, which runs within a particular virtual host. The <Context> element contains docbase attribute.

docbase - specifies Document base directory for a web application.

The directory which you specify as docbase must contain WEB-INF/ directory.

The classes in WEB-INF/classes may not load if both docbase and appbase are equal.

If classes inside WEB-INF/classes is not loading, then you can create a separate directory for Application Base and make appbase to point it.

An Example Configuration :

<Host name="hioxindia.com" appBase="/home/hiox/public_html/webapps" >
<Alias> hioxindia.com </Alias >
<Context path="" reloadable="true" docBase="/home/hiox/public_html" debug="1"/>
<Context path="/manager" debug="0" privileged="true"
docBase="/usr/local/jakarta/tomcat/server/webapps/manager">
</Context>
</Host>

Here a separate directory called webapps is created under /home/hiox/ in which you can place .war files. Here the document-base is /home/hiox/public_html. The .jsp,.html files are placed in public_html and servlets, packages and class files are placed in WEB-INF/class, which is inside public_html.

By Selva, On - 2008-07-28

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