More about Tomcat Contexts

Here is some more relevent information about Contexts in Tomcat. This is just an addition to the post I made yesterday. I found this on the Tomcat Deployer How-To webpage.

A Word About Contexts

In talking about deployment of web applications, the concept of a Context is required to be understood. A Context is what Tomcat calls a web application.

In order to configure a Context within Tomcat a Context Descriptor is required. A Context Descriptor is simply an XML file that contains Tomcat related configuration for a Context, e.g naming resources or session manager configuration. In earlier versions of Tomcat the content of a Context Descriptor configuration was often stored within Tomcat's primary configuration file server.xml but this is now discouraged (although it currently still works).

Context Descriptors not only help Tomcat to know how to configure Contexts but other tools such as the Tomcat Manager and TDC often use these Context Descriptors to perform their roles properly.

The locations for Context Descriptors are;

1. $CATALINA_HOME/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/context.xml
2. $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/[webappname]/META-INF/context.xml

If a Context Descriptor is not provided for a Context, Tomcat automatically creates one and places it in (1) with a filename of [webappname].xml although if manually created, the filename need not match the web application name as Tomcat is concerned only with the Context configuration contained within the Context Descriptor file(s).