Virtual Host in Tomcat 8

Question

I want to map a domain mydomain.com to an application. I added a <Host> entry into server.xml , but when I go to www.mydomain.com it shows the Tomcat start page instead of my application.

server.xml:

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">

  <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.LockOutRealm">
   <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>
  </Realm>

  <Host name="localhost" autoDeploy="true" unpackWARs="true" appBase="webapps">
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" pattern="%h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b" suffix=".txt" prefix="localhost_access_log" directory="logs"/>
  </Host>


  <Host name="mydomain.com" autoDeploy="true" unpackWARs="true" appBase="webapps">
    <Alias>www.mydomain.com</Alias>
    <Context privileged="true" debug="0" docBase="/opt/tomcat/webapps/MyDomain" path=""/>
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" pattern="%h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b" suffix=".txt" prefix="localhost_access_log." directory="logs" resolveHosts="false"/>
  </Host>

</Engine>

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You have defined two hosts with the same deployment directory webapps

If you want localhost to be different than mydomain define two deployment directories and rename the root context war to ROOT.war. it is not recommended to use <Context tag

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

<Host name="www.mydomain.com" autoDeploy="true" unpackWARs="true" appBase="mydomain">
</Host>

You do not need alias since the host name contains the domain name. All others requests coming from a DNS entry different to www.domain.com will be served by localhost

If localhost and www.domain.com are the same, then you just need a <Host and deploy a ROOT.war

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

Answer 2

What worked for me was to map my applications like this in the server.xml file.

Delete the host entry you added and inside the host entry you had from the start put this:

<Context path="/" docBase="yourApp">
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
</Context>
<Context path="/ROOT" docBase="ROOT">
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
</Context>

Dont forget to change yourApp