Can a Tomcat docBase span multiple folders?
tomcat, tomcat6
Solution
I use it this way:
<Context docBase="jquery" path="/js/jquery" />
<Context docBase="foobar/www/javascript" path="/js" />
<Context docBase="foobar/www/css" path="/css" />
<Context docBase="foobar" path="/" />
Important for the concrete context is the path-attribute. A request is processed from top to bottom.
So a request for `/css/default.css` is only processed from the 3rd context.
A different order may catches a different context.
This is wrong:
<Context docBase="foobar" path="/" />
<Context docBase="jquery" path="/js/jquery" />
<Context docBase="foobar/www/javascript" path="/js" />
<Context docBase="foobar/www/css" path="/css" />
Because `/css/default.css` will be catched by the first context, not the fourth.
Edit 2013-08-10: (Not by the answer-author) It is important to note that while the above technique will work, much of it is actually incorrect. Please see comments for details.
Problem
I apologize if this is a poor question, but I'm using Windows and looking to see if there's a way to run a webapp via Tomcat where the `docBase` is multiple folders. A little more background is that we have our Eclipse project set up in a way that the web content is broken into separate folders. One folder represents what our SDK provides, one is a folder which has SDK patches, and a third is the project-specific components -- either of the last two folders could have subfolders/files that "erase" items from the first two. I'd like to try and have my context file point back into my dev environment so that I don't need to build/deploy in order to see the changes I'm making. Is this possible? A couple other notes: - We thought about using symlinks via `mklink`, but didn't want to create complexity if simplicity was out there. - This is just for running locally so simple hacks would be allowed. When we create the WAR which gets deployed to the real environment the ANT script creates a single web root.