Referencing Environment Variables in web.xml

Question

I\'m pre-packaging a JSP web-app that relies on some file path settings found within web.xml. These settings are unknown at packaging time, because they reference a path the

Answer 1

You can use Ant-style variable substitution in any of the tomcat xml config files, such as:

    mvc-dispatcher
    ${foo}

Where foo is a Java System Property (sysprop).

You can't use OS Environment Variables (envvars) directly, I think...

To use envvars, you can put

set "CATALINA_OPTS=-DsomeJavaSysProp=%SOME_OS_ENVVAR%"

in bin/setenv.bat (or similarly in bin/setenv.sh for *nix). You may need to create that file. Tomcat will run this file when it starts.

As CATALINA_OPTS is an envvar (as opposed to a command line option), it should not be visible by other users on the system (save ancient Unixes), though I haven't tested this.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/

If you are using Spring, you can create a bean and then directly use envvars or sysprops in Spring XML config files (though not web.xml).