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Tomcat: Modify content in META-INF/context.xml

+1 vote
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I'm using Apache Tomcat 6.0.24 and I've deployed a web application that defines its resources into META-INF/context.xml , especially information about connection pool

Sometimes I''ve to edit that file to change some data , i.e, database's JDBC url

I've seen that restart web application is not enough to apply these changes , so I need to redeploy the web application ( I mean, unpack WAR file, modify it , repack it again, copy to deploy folder ...)

Question:
Do you know other way to modify META-INF/context.xml and apply the changes and don't have to redeploy the WAR file? Restart the web application is not a problem, but restart Tomcat is?

posted Dec 17, 2013 by Mandeep Sehgal

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Without having any idea really of the precise mechanism behind database connections, I can  still imagine that with the possibility of pooled connections to said database(s), it may be difficult to detect such a change in the corresponding context.xml and apply them "on the fly". Even more so if such connections could be shared between different applications.
commented Dec 17, 2013 by Bob Wise
Thanks, but I didn't said that I neeed to apply changes "on the fly". Indeed, I said "Restart the web application is not a problem"

I only wan't to have to redeploy the web application to modify META-INF/context.xml and apply changes.
commented Dec 17, 2013 by anonymous

1 Answer

+1 vote

How do you feel about a Tomcat upgrade?

Automatic deployment has had a bit of an overhaul in Tomcat 8 and those changes have been back-ported to 7.0.x for the next release. The behavior in a number of edge cases is now clearly defined:
http://ci.apache.org/projects/tomcat/tomcat8/docs/config/automatic-deployment.html

In your case, you'd want to deploy as a WAR with unpackWARs set to true. Then, any time you edit the META-INF/context.xml in the unpacked directory the web application will be redeployed using the new context.xml

This might work with 6 but I can't remember (it is a long time since I looked at the 6.0.x automatic deployment code).

answer Dec 17, 2013 by Sanketi Garg
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